Grad School---coffee, zoloft, & Monster energy drinks

The one thing I have noticed is that I tend to gravitate towards liquid caffeine whenever I am feeling nervous. Isn't that reversed? Shouldn't I drink green, decaffeinated tea and listen to mellow sitar music? Instead, I play industrial electronica music, pop my zoloft (all 200 mg), and run out to get myself the following: a grande Starbucks iced coffee with a shot of espresso and creamer, followed shortly by a Monster lo-cal energy drink, followed by perhaps another large regular coffee, all the while walking around listening to hard-core, heart-pumping industrial beats. That's graduate school for you, I guess.

Barrista: "Hi what can I get for you today?"
Me: "A grande iced coffee with cream and a shot, please."
Barrista: "How many shots in that?"
Me: "What's the maximum number of shots allowed?"

Thanks for reading! More to come! :)

200 mg of Zoloft later....

Re-reading that last post makes me glad I no longer have to live a life of psychological turmoil. In case you haven't guessed, I saw my psychiatrist and she refilled my anti-depressant for me. I had no idea, but apparently I was going through a psychotropic withdrawal phase caused by going off meds cold turkey. My doctor said it is not good to go off abruptly because it can cause emotional symptoms in the patient that are similar to withdrawal symptoms.

Now, I feel very happy and I want to share that happiness with you. Puppies, kittens, tomatoes with goat cheese, these things make me feel happy and I hope they make you happy as well. Good movies, an inspiring essay or speech, dancing with nobody watching, getting to a checkpoint on call of duty, exchanging a nice greeting with a stranger, listening to a new song that totally rocks your body, finding a video on youtube that makes you laugh...these things are pleasant for me and I encourage people to try to find something pleasant every day, even if that means putting down your work or homework just for a minute to achieve this.

I have one assignment left for summer session. ONE assignment! Then, so long as I get a minimum of a C in both classes, I get my Bachelor's degree from an accredited State University! Then two months of being broke and bored....then back to class in the fall, this time as a Graduate Student (notice the capitalization there).

My shrink recommended keeping my mind active this summer because I have a fear that I will get very lazy and not be able to survive my first semester. So I have decided to re-read my mental health memoirs, read some Kurt Vonnegut books, and then blog about my favorite parts here on this blog. So stay tuned! More to come! I'm feeling good! Have a great day! Thanks for reading!
~Electra

How I learned to Love My Psychic Carnage

 *content warning: drug use, the cinema of Takashi Miike, bra size. *

The woman with the blonde hair and the red dress stands facing the camera. Her head is cocked as she reads her lines off a placard which the camera captures and zooms in until the characters fill the screen. This is a bizarre world of Yakuza murder, animal-headed men, and absurdity so profound it causes a mild headache. 

This is Gozu, a film by master director, Takashi Miike.

This movie is one of my top, all-time favorite movies because it reminds me of my life. I watched Gozu around the time I was an unmedicated pothead dating a drug dealing, gun-toting alcoholic who would later be caught by undercover narcotics agents and wind up spending all his illicit drug profits on a good attorney. I think I was 19 at the time. On the surface, I was a rather boring wallflower; a cashier at a bottom-feeding pharmacy, a skinny, flat-chested teenager with a predilection for marijuana. Beneath it, I was a fan of Miike movies, not because his movies shocked me, but because they reminded me of my psychic carnage, the invisible wounds of a damaged life.

Why am I writing this? Simply because my psychiatrist will not authorize a refill of my anti-depressants and you, the poor, ensnared reader, are the one thing keeping me afloat in this lagoon of angst.

Also, I want to show off. I am no longer that skinny, flat-chested marijuana smoking, drug-dealer dating screw up. Now I’m an overweight, 34G cup sober nutcase, 4 days away from a bachelor’s degree from an accredited University. I even got accepted into a graduate program. But some things never change. That nugget of damaged nerves still thrives in the nether regions of my wounded soul. I have learned to love that damage…it is what keeps me humble and always eager to improve, as if to change my personality would somehow enable me to erase the fractures of my past.

Miike is a genius. Why have you not watched any of his movies? Pardon the illogical leaps from topic to topic, but I am a skitz and my train of thought has a lot of stop-overs.