January 14–17, 2003 — Leave the rest behind

I started my day at the grocery store because I didn’t have any milk for my cereal. When I got home, I opened the milk carton and smelled it, not feeling optimistic enough to take an expiry date at its word.

The carton smelled a bit sour, so I poured some milk into one of Johnston and Andrew’s glasses, not wanting sour milk in a cup of my own. (I have my own dishes. I am one of those roommates that no one wants to live with.) When I tasted the milk, it was fine. I emptied the cup into the sink because I only like milk on cereal or with chocolate flavouring. (In retrospect, I probably should have poured the milk onto my cereal, but I think I was worried that the glass it was in might have been contaminated due to Andrew and Johnston’s lackadaisical washing techniques.)

After my trip to the grocery store and a careful assessment of the freshness of my new carton of milk (now marked with my name on all four sides), I was ready to eat. So far this month, I have managed to finish almost a kilogram of Cheerios. I don’t know why I stopped eating cereal for such a long time.

Excitement about cereal aside, though, it hasn’t been much of a day. Or it has, but my mood from 5:00 pm on destroyed any progress I made during my first eight hours of consciousness.

Too many dreams again. During the day and at night. At night, I always wake up during the good parts, probably because I know they can’t be real. Then I stare at the ceiling. Sometimes I’m annoyed at myself for waking up, and sometimes I think I’d be cheating if I enjoyed myself in a dream because I would feel better than reality should allow me to feel.

Lately, during the day, I entertain more and more fantasies about what I might do when I stop living here, whether I give my notice at the same time as Johnston or a few months later. I have so many dreams. Of travel or escape. Today’s daydreaming concentrated on the idea of living with a girl, sharing a one-bedroom apartment. The reality of it would never match the way I imagined it today, but I think I would still feel much better than I do now.

I don’t think it’s sharing an apartment I’m dreaming of, though. I just want to be capable of the sort of relationship that could hypothetically one day involve living with the person I’m in a relationship with.

From there, I started daydreaming about people I don’t feel I should be allowed to daydream about, which led to the usual guilt and sadness.

One of my new hobbies is reading about medication. Antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs are my favourites. This started when Nathan burned a CD for me with the lyrics, “Don’t say no to pills, Ativan won’t kill.” I remembered the Douglas Coupland story called “Fire at the Ativan Factory” and decided to read about Ativan. I looked it up in my prescription drug book and was directed to the page for lorazepam, Ativan’s generic name. (On the opposite page is loratidine, the generic name for Claritin, which I used to take everyday.) From the quick reference guide, I learned that lorazepam is a benzodiazepine anti-anxiety drug with a high dependence rating. I turned to the page on antidepressants and read about how they worked. (Or, more specifically, that no one really seems to know for sure how they work, but that there are some theories on the matter.)

I decided that I would concentrate really hard on encouraging my brain cells to absorb lots and lots of neurotransmitters and hope for the best. I felt terrible when I started writing this, but now I feel a bit better, so maybe it’s working. Or maybe writing this is therapeutic. Or maybe I don’t have any control at all over the way I feel and this is just a coincidence.

When I used to take them, I was convinced that my allergy pills weren’t doing anything because there were days when they didn’t work at all, and there was no way to prove that I wouldn’t have felt fine without them on the days they ostensibly did work. I stopped taking pills for a long time, and I’ve just now started taking vitamins again. For therapeutic use only, they say, and now with lutein. I’ve never felt terribly comfortable taking vitamins, but my week of strep throat has led me to believe that I need to take better care of myself.

I don’t think their dependence rating is very high, at least.

Vitamins aside, my morning routine is much improved. Breakfast, reading the newspaper, and not using the Internet. Plentiful neurotransmitters or not, I think avoiding the Internet and being too lazy to turn my computer on a lot of the time are the keys to productivity, and even with the occasional three-hour bout of staring at walls, I’m still getting a lot more done.

Once I get over my fear of sour milk I’ll really be on my way.