The sweet taste of hypomania!

So "Lewy's Life" pretty much equates to a running up date on my health now!:

Remeber the diary free thing? Well i started a follow up of wheat free (just in case my negative blood test for Coeliac the other month wasn't up to scratch) which lasted til after breakfast when i nearly fell asleep (and i'd only had bacon, scrambled egg, mushroom and baken beans!).

With exams comming up (now mid way, and not doing at all bad considering), and after a whole bank holiday weekend of sleeping midnight til 10am but being a zombie, incapable of doing anything (even procrastinating), i decided to drop my perscribed morning and night pills just to shake things up!

I became aware ofsome supliments that really seemed to revitalise (at least for a time), "Happy Days: 5-HTP", so i thought i'd give them a try while i was off the tricyclic. It likely has SSRI action, which is apparentl a no-no in conjuction with these:



They're a night time thing, right, cos the active ingedient is the pre-cursor for Serotonin, which is then converted to Melatonin by the pineal gland when low light levels on the retina trigger the SCN to initiate a neural cain of event (gota love how this is also revision for my neuroscience module!).

So i get a little sleep off them, as one might hope, don't particually notice much direct improvement in getting to sleep, or much else. But over the next few days things pick up in general, and come 2am, the morning of my second exam my brain's starts banging out so many interesting idea i have to grab a pen and pad (for the second night in a row). However, after my 4 hour exam (which would have gone even better if i'd only had an extra, extra 45 minutes), the insparation just kept coming!; i spent most of the rest of the time, until 1am, filling 10 A4 sides with idea spider diagrams, designs and research! only just managing to drag myself away for my doctor's appointment, hockey, uncharacteristicly enthusiastic and incessant conversation + a quick shower, but not dinner....

Anyhow, one upshot of my, near transendant, eye opening experience and the precipitated research and synergy of ideas is knowing that:

• I've had Dysthymia for at least 7 years (just a succinct way of saying what ppl who know me already know).
• My dyslexia is more specifically Sluggish Cognitive Tempo (which again fits so well given that i've been quite litterally absent mindedly wondering about my ADHD, but not so much seeing the H).
• 5-HTP (and presumably the increase in distributed Serotonin levels that it brings) fixed me!...for a few days at least. Infact it appears to have brought on 24 hours of hypomania; in this case a slightly more vivid form of the insparation that occasionally graces me once in a blue moon.
• This may suggest that i'm also classifiable in the range of (the milder) bipolar type II, with a rating of perhaps 30/100 on the scale used in Stephen Fry's docu first part.
• I've had a very helpful little booklet, for some years, that my Mother (i believe) photocopied out of a book for me. It highly recomends 5-HTP to get sleep and well being back on track, allong with a shortlis of important vitamins and trace elements that might be suplimented. So i tracked some of those down too while at the chemist, ending up with Magnesium-OK, as they just happen to have most of the important things in there (and no female specific hormones that i can see!).

Either the revitalising effects of 5-HTP wore offf very fast, or the other suppliments gave a helping hand, becuase i had a classic, rubbish day, straight after breakfast, today! Bit of a coincidence being the morning after taking the Magnesium-OK for the first time. Hoping it's transitory. I think i did need to try something more new, because the 5-HTP alone haven exactly enable much sleeping, or dreaming that i know of. And i'd rather not totally loose my mind, even in a fit of inspiration!

The old and the new

My shiny, new copy of “Supreme Commander” came in the post this morning: on the day of it’s release. Purchased for £7 less than it was listed on Amazon (despite a sponsored Google search results purporting it at £5 less that it *actually* was! Mmm… subtle fraudulence). And I’m all excited cos it’s the *real* sequel to Total Annihilation (my favourite game of all time)….

BUT MY COMPUTER WON’T PLAY IT! (if the 1Gb demo I downloaded the other day after making my pre-order is anything to go by, which it almost certainly is) My computer meets the Recommended specs on the nose (give or take some ambiguity about Vertex/Pixel shader jargon). To my shock I realised my computer is over 900 days old (2 na half years) and so may genuinely be too decrepit for this demanding title (TA itself totally killed computers of the time too so I remember, 10 years ago). But I’ve only just finished sorting out this computer into a nice silent configuration, resplendent with heat sinks, I can barely bring myself to contemplate the well practiced new graphics card, motherboard, processor, RAM procedure.

This one time I curse Moore’s Law! If only I could sell one of my kidneys to splash out on a mini heap of new hardware for the odd game of blow up the red guy.

Oh, btw, since my last post I totally gave up giving up dairy products after 5 days (no benefits there), and I didn’t bother blowing £250 on a food allergy test as conventional medical advice firmly states there is no know link to that and tiredness. Plus the lovely york test lady phoned to inform me (predictably) that my indicator test showed some food groups could be troubling me, so would I be proceeding to upgrade to the full screen to find out exactly what might be wrong?...”I’ll think about it.” I hate sales pitches.

I did get to see the fabled Neurologist in oxford though, who kindly prescribed me something to get me off to sleep at a sensible time each night, and if that alone didn’t pan out (which it hasn’t really) I get some Modafinil, the drug I put on my to do list a year and a half ago…

Time is change. Sometimes it seems far too slow. Others: nonsensically rapid. Fingers crossed that the uppers and downers get me sorted enough that I get my neural nets coursework in only a week late, and the rest of my life is a dreamy success!

Switzerland christmas holiday 2006 diary:

Written on my XDA, ready to post up using wifi which i didn't have appropriate swiss telecoms card for...so here it is posted the normal way:

Saturday (23rd):
Left house at 5am (i loaded most of the cases into the mini van taxi), 1h30 queue to get through security checks + plane crew 30min late due to working late the day before with fog, then take off was aborted, right hand generator replaced on the tarmack + refueled, so a further 1 hour late. Berne airport is small and friendly. Onto double decker, 2 drop off's then us at the "Sunstar" hotel.

Sunday:
Woke at 3am so spent 2 hours reading Freakonomics in the bathroom and nearly sleeping before rhea's alarms went repeatedly at 7:30. The breakfast buffet was very comprehensive, though the orange juice tended to run out, even with the little glasses. Up to "First" on the gondalars oposite the hotel; so hot up there I had to take off me fleece, leaving T and coat (glad I had thermal tousers on though, for all the time spent sitting on snow). A couple of runs from the top of the chair lifts left rhea tired and bruised after a rough fall, so she was lagging on the descent to grindlewald, with a fair kilometer walk at the bottom allong board unfriendly track and pavement through the town.

Montag:
Day off boarding as rhea's utterly battered from yesterday and i'm pretty achy myself. Ironically we had a earlier start today in order to catch the train up to "kleine schneidigger" via "grun", then up through the mountain to the "top of europe": a big modern place kinda like like a james bond super villian lair pearched 3.5Km up, complete with observatory/death ray. Christmas dinner for rhea and I was fries and salad, which was cool as we've been missing out on the simple food with the hotel's fancy 4/5 course dinners. Ice 'placace' was slippery but not as fancy as i'd imagined (be better is they served vodka shots!), took several panarama's, half filling rhea's 1Gb memory card in her new camera. Just made it back down in 1h30 for the evening sleigh ride, which was mostly wheels on road with 100 meters of gravely sounding snow, before the 2 poor horses steamed their way (literally) slow up the ascent to town. Out like a light at 9:30 while rhea was outside on the phone to england.

Deinstag:
On my own back up to Kl. Sn. On the 10:30. Took in 3 different runs before heading down route 21 (after a false start taking and wrong turning and lifting back up), nearly when back to the same dead end chair lift station, so walked back up a slope, only to be faced with a rubbish length of narrow flats. Rest of the decent alternated between decent streaches and patches of solid ice, impossible to board on. Made it down eventually, walking the last seaction on the flat again (getting a taste of what rhea was grumbling about on sunday), to the station, back in time for generously sized waffles in the lounge. Canaster avec spasticated laughing fit, apres shower and generous helpings of buffett dinner.

Mittwoch:
Floated down for the end of breakfast at 10am, aching/painful feet feet all around, so just go up to First and make 2 runs from the top before spotting the parrents knocking about up there. Chips and pitza on the mountain, then split from the family and boarded my lonesome way back to town (run was in better condition, more actual snow had appeared). Had a propper swim but avoided the sauna/lobster room this time. Dinned, complete with our super enthusiastic waiter, then laughed as the elvis impersonator's sound system tripped out the hotel power circuit repeatedly while we were playing some more cards (beginner's luck had worn off for me).

Donnestag: Epic lunch outting, starting at 11am, with 9 separate transport legs on the way there, including (but not limited to): bus, 4 person gondalar, 30 person gondalars, vernacular rail, normal rail and foot. All I can say is thank god the swiss transport system works as good as their time pieces! Lunch *was* taken in a revolving resturant of 60s film fame, 3Km up with the birds and crazy-ass paragliders. So was ok that we only just got back for dinner.

Freitag: Should get our last bit of boarding in... indeed we did, going up First one last time I finally felt i'd got it down, taking little jumps without problem. Rhea left me at the top, as her knees gave out again, so I made a final on my own. It felt like the right time to be going, my legs were the tiredest they'd been all week, having to stop repeatedly before they gave out. It seemed the families had landed at the hotel the previous night, as the previously quiet, little pool had 25 ppl in, mostly rowdy children. The entertainment suited the clientle, boogy and tap, fairly captivating jazz piano and dance/juggling. An odd combination, but I was happy to break off our family card game to watch, especially having been lubricated with generously proportioned long island iced tea. Threw stuff into suitcase in good spirits.

Saturday will then involve knocking about Grindlewald town til our bus connection to the airport at 2:20pm... Yup, all as planned, sucessful shopping and a takeaway pitza from across the road before departure. We're currently hanging in the departure lounge, and will be for the next 2 hours as plane is late...

Blues and Space Jazz

So the cow milk related product embargo lead nowhere and I blatantly couldn't be arsed avoiding wheat! I have sent off for a £20 finger prick type testing kit, which should arrive just in time for me not to be in the country…

:heavy sigh of depression:…I’ve been back at my home in Rugby since Sunday night and since a couple of days before that I’ve been slowly spiralling. Don’t think it’s Christmas shopping blues. Surely it can’t just be seasonal dysfunction. Is the prospect of being back in my registered address of 23 years that bad?! I mean, summer here was a write off, and the Easter before it is, to me, synonymous with lethargy, but it’s not a bad place:

Free food cooked for me, old mates to see 1-2 times a week, drums (which I’m yet to be in the mood to play so far)…maybe the association of mental blocks on work, in my top floor domain, accumulated over the years, is standing in my way?

I haven’t been doing either coursework assignment (any if you include CMS too), but I *have* been playing with this stupid applet (see pic: right) incessantly since Alex sent me the link, damn him! It’s got the whole causality chain thing going for it, like domino toppling of my childhood or that Honda ad. I’m a Rube Goldberg machine addict!

Also, been watching Cowboy Bebop. It’s comes in 20 minute episodes (like scrubs, which makes it dangerously Moorish) is jazzy and eclectic soundtrack fits neatly with the usual, fast paced, stylistic animation, no wonder it was a hit show. While, generally not gory or explicit, it’s definitively no kid’s show, the dark side of this fictional universe is ever present, with likeable characters killed off just when you were thinking an episode might get cheesily happy.

Care seems to be taken making Faye Valentine not very likeable as a main ‘good guy’ character, which is refreshing. So far the physics is somewhat malleable, but then this more a space western, that a serious anime like Ghost in the Shell (Stand Alone Complex). I liked the Transformers the Movie reference in the 3rd episode: “reversing polarity” of the missiles, nice touch, doubt many ppl were sad enough to notice that one


[Damn! Now I’m watching crazy Japanese Rube Goldberg machines on YouTube!]

This week I shall mostly be avoiding dairy!:

In a bid to not feel like shit half the time, I'm looking to find out if i have an allergy to something which has been making me tired and fuzzy headed for the last several years. I'm starting with the components of a bowl cereal: Weetabix, Crunchy Nut and Milk (i.e.wheat, corn, dairy and various others), since I had a total energy crash the other day after breakfast, falling asleep for 3 hours when i'd already had at least 10 that night.

A 3rd blog for the personal and mundane:

Hey, so i've been feeling particually tired and rubbish of late, but nevermind. I've still been able to finish reading Accelerando (by Charles Stross - basically a dramatisation of "The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil) and check out some new software/services:

Since previously trusty Firefox went to pieces on my 64bit computer for no apparent reason, i've been needing an alternative. Eventually i got around to trying Opera (which i'm using right now). It has tabbed browsing and some useful features firefox doesn't have, so i recomend it.

This grovey picture by Eboy inspired me to check out a few other things:

Last.fm - a custom internet radio player, equivalent to Pandora, arguably better.

Well, err, actually that's all the new stuff i'll be using from there for a bit, but i did also just get on Facebook which had been coming for a while. Well… gotta try and stay in touch with the youth, you know, even if i am just an old fart at heart!