wheeeeee

ok so....i've decided that i'm going to try to start doing at least a post a day. or every couple of days. as opposed to my current record of every 3 or 4 years.

anyway...

so here's the latest.

i've quit smoking. to some people this has come as a huge monumental shock (hell, to me it's a huge monumental shock), but i wouldn't have been able to do it with out the help of something called an e-cigarette.

it's such a wonderful thing. basically it has a battery, an atomizer for the liquid and nicotine juice that gets atomized and inhaled. there's also various ingredients in the nic juice that produce vapor when you exhale, but all in all, it's a helluva lot healthier for you than cigarettes are with their 4000 or so chemicals (not to mention the tar and ash etc...) that you inhale.

so to test the theory that i've quit smoking, a couple of weeks ago i tried to take a drag off a friends cigarette.

i nearly coughed my left nut up. had tears streaming down my face. it was worse than when i originally started smoking i think.

it led me to wonder how in the FUCK i'd managed to do that to myself multiple times a day for the past 20+ years.

i still haven't come up with a good answer for that.

anyway. i can't recommend this strongly enough to my friends who smoke. www.puresmoker.com was where i got mine from. (not a paid ad. just a company with awesome customer service and good products). i got the pure smoker ace kit and a couple of boxes of cartomizers (which they call atomz) and all in all it was about $60.

granted, this was a bit of a pricey start up cost for me given our usual money situation, but in the end it's been worth it.

anothing (er....wtf happened there? i'm just gonna leave that one for posterity)

take 2 aaaaand action!

another thing i've learned about recently is drug augmentation. i learned this the hard way.

i'm bi-polar. there i said it and everyone knows now. wheeeee. good times(tm).

so i'm on a whole shit ton of drugs to combat this situation and to keep me fairly level and low key. there's also drugs for some other options that i've added on to the mix (it's kinda like buying a car?) but they didn't seem to figure into this as much.

so the 3 drugs that are in question here are risperidone, lamictal and divalproex sodium.

what i didn't know about these 3 drugs was the way they interacted with each other.

the lamictal seems to be at the top of the food chain, with the divalproex being second and the resperidone coming in a close 3rd.

we lowered the dosage of the risperidone to about half of what i had been taking. about a week or so went by and everything was all sunshine and roses (ok, not really but hey...) and then, suddenly out of the blue (or at least it was to me) everything went wonky. wonky is a technical term which, roughly translated means "oh fuck...here we go."

so.....basically, when you lower the dosage of the risperidone, it in turn (basically) lowers the dosage of the divalproex and the lamictal.

ok, that's a little broad, but you get the picture.

so....this resulted in an extra trip to my psychiatrist to get my doses adjusted...again.

to top that off, i ran out of the divalproex and missed a dose. usually when i miss a dose of one of them, it takes me a couple of days to get right again. so i'm feeling a little funky today. doesn't help that it's raining and i literally could NOT get my eyes open this morning.

so to add to all of this, my GI Bill stuff has gone completely wonky (see, it's a technical term that's good for all sorts of things) and i don't actually know if i'm going to get paid for the next month or 2. if i don't, then we're pretty much financially fuckered.

things have been submitted to try to get it straightened out, but i'm not sure that it got done in time, so we'll have to see.

the shitty thing is, this is for last semester, so it makes it a bit more difficult to go and talk to teachers about it since they typically don't have said records that are needed right there on hand.

and i always feel guilty about making them dig this shit up. it's not like they don't have enough else to do.

anyway. sorry about the wall of text. i started writing and got carried away. maybe if i write more often i won't get so carried away.

or maybe it'll happen more.

i guess we'll just have to wait and see.