In a nutshell

For those who don’t know my eight year psych history, or what the hell happened to get me from point A to point B, with stops at Z F and Q in between, here’s the summary (just for future reference):

I had a bipolar II diagnosis for four years which involved putting me on an antipsychotic, an antidepressant, and a mood stabilizer all at the same time. I started out my psych history by going to get antidepressants, which I took for four years. I was having some suicidal feelings, I felt out of place, I didn’t fit it, my childhood had a lot of abuse, basically I had existential depression. I could have been helped by talking through it, but my therapist didn’t know anything about gifteds and I didn’t know I was in a process of positive disintegration. I was unable to fit into the mainstream and it made me feel that there was something wrong with me. I had also been raped not long before my therapist encouraged me to either check into the hospital or get a prescription for antidepressants. I got a prescription for Paxil.

SSRI’s have various psychological side effects, including withdrawal symptoms which create auditory hallucinations, random electrical impulses shooting through your body (The Zaps), insomnia, and at the worst case, akathisia. That’s a fancy term for what is essentially mania. Jacked up on enough SSRI’s, you WILL go manic, and that’s what happened to me four years later. The initial high of SSRI’s had worn off, and I still felt badly. Not only that but I was having physiological symptoms in my body and was basically being tortured by the medication neurologically. The doctor kept deciding I could be happier, and the prescription went up to the top level that can be safely prescribed. I should also mention my doctor was a general practitioner, a common experience for people on SSRI’s. Eventually I snapped, I stopped eating, bathing, started ranting and raving and dressing weird. I was officially in psychosis. Some well intentioned but misguided friends took me to the psychiatric ward.

A French psychiatric ward. I don’t speak french, and most of the staff didn’t speak english. This was in Canada. There were english speaking psychiatric wards, but I wasn’t living in the proper jurisdiction to be allowed to go there.

The doctors never really took a history, I spent less than two hours with psychiatrists over the course of six weeks. My treatment was determined the day I went in, without a doctor actually talking to me. I was labeled Bipolar II, with possible Schizoaffective disorder. No one asked if I was gifted, and no one knew what that meant either, including myself. I was told that disagreeing with the diagnosis PROVED I was sick and lacked insight into my condition. Accepting the label was required before I was permitted to leave the hospital. Everything about me became wrong.

The medication I was put on cause me to have seizures, hear voices, get depressed, have painful energy in my body, gain 80 pounds, some people get diabetes from the drugs too. I had brain damage, my memory was shot completely, I couldn’t move much, I started sleeping all the time, and I was unable to hold down a job. I became disabled. I accepted this because I was crazy, and crazy people are disabled people. But as I wandered half dead through various outpatient service centres, I started meeting more politicized crazy people.

Over four years I researched psychiatry, the case studies of the medications I was on, psychiatric thoughts of madness, the history of psychiatry, and eventually the stories of other people who had been in the system and gotten out and off the drugs and recovered. Eventually I almost died twice because of my medication, one started having toxic blood levels, which was indicating liver damage. The other one caused a rash which can sometimes result in Steven-Johnsons Syndrome, basically your skin blisters and falls off, a lot of people die from it, the recovery rates are poor. I was getting off my medication and trying alternative treatments (homeopathy and supplements like Omega 3-6-9, and Iron, which it turns out I’m deficient in). That’s when I suddenly wondered if being gifted had anything to do with being “crazy.” And I read about positive disintegration and overexcitabilities.

I’m off medication now, and a lot of negative things I assumed was me being crazy turns out to have been related to the medication. For eight years I have tried to fit in with society and I almost died.

I think a lot of people with Bipolar II have been seriously misdiagnosed, there is little being done in psychiatry to find out if there is a reason someone feels crappy. So no, I don’t believe you can say there are real bipolars out there. I know we’re supposed to believe that, but I think a lot of people, given REAL care that is about them rather than the needs of the people around them, have a good chance of recovery. That sounds awful to some people, but believe me, I’ve done the research, not with a government grant, but I’ve read enough volumes to know whereof I speak. The drugs are actually called chemical lobotomies by the doctors who invented them.

And by the way, during my research I found out they cannot prove a brain chemical link to madness. Some psychiatric survivors involved in Mind Freedom challenged the APA to release their research proving conclusively a link, and the response was basically, no, we have no proof, BUT we know it’s true.

Woah

Sensual overexcitability fucking rules.

How to twist an idea

It should come as no surprise that knowledge is often coloured by preconceived judgments and values, and that someone’s words can be twisted to serve an alternate purpose than what was really meant. In spectatorship theory, multiple readings are a given, as much as you want a film to mean something specific, someone can come along, get a different meaning, and it is no less valid to them. Does that mean it’s the right or wrong meaning? Or that you failed to make sure your intention was clear? I don’t know.

What I do know is this little tidbit I picked up last night from Vonnegut’s A Man Without A Country. The infamous quote by Karl Marx, “Religion is the opiate of the masses” has been assumed to mean that religion is worthless, a form of willing delusion which people engage in. We have to see that we’re looking at that through ideas around things such as drug addictions and our judgments of the people who use drugs and our own limited understanding of why they would use drugs. Vonnegut pointed out that Marx was in fact an opium user, and at the time it was the most effective painkiller around. Can you imagine if he has said something in contemporary lingo that had less stigma, like “Religion is the Tylenol of the masses.”

What he meant is that religious concepts alieviate human suffering, which is a very different meaning than the one most accept.

But the alternate meaning held more value for people who wanted to use it in nefarious ways, by shutting down religious institutions in Communist dictatorships.

I should also say Communism is not a negative thing any more than Christianity (Vonnegut also says this), it’s the Application of communism in a totalitarian form that is negative.

An ideology can be twisted to serve any purpose, which is why context is important. For instance, psychiatry has at it’s basis a very humanitarian principle, that people have psychological distress and need care and compassion. HOWEVER, various assumptions and ideologies have been Applied in psychiatry which make it’s practice today a negative thing. Capitalism would be one of the worst forces which have shaped psychiatry as we know it. A sick patient is worth more than a healthy one, it creates jobs in the pharmaceutical industry which can keep making them take expensive pills that while not curing create a docility which makes people easier to control. And then there are the hospitals, which need patients to keep returning because it’s very profitable. My own hospitalization cost $24 000. Then there are the outpatient service organizations, the cost of psychiatrist, therapist, psychologist appointments, etc etc. It makes a lot of money For Certain People. In the long run though it costs a lot of money too, a person unable to work because their medication has destroyed the ability to remember or to move around even won’t be able to support themselves. They become more dependent on a system which needs their dependence. They will live in poverty and that creates more psychological distress. It’s a cycle which is hard to get out of.

What would revolutionize psychiatry is to eliminate the rewards of capitalist intervention. How that could be done without also hindering the funds available to help people with psychiatric disabilities, temporary or not, I don’t know. I’m trying not to throw the baby out with the bathwater anymore. Some psychiatrists had some very good ideas, like R.D. Laing, Thomas Szasz, and Loren Mosher. And some, like Benjamin Rush, had some really appalling ideas. But Benjamin Rush is still highly regarded in psychiatry, while Loren Mosher is considered a bit of a kook.

I’m not really going to come up with a good answer to the question of removing totalitarian capitalist ideology from psychiatry yet, but maybe someone else can. I do think we need to set up more Soteria houses, more structure for alternative care. There are some alternatives around. What we really need is a handbook for the lay person to care for someone in an extreme state without inflicting further psychological damage. One thing to know is that if someone is having a delusion, it’s not your place to make a judgment about that and try to tell them that their delusion isn’t real. It might be VERY real, but they can’t communicate about it in a way that makes sense to you. For instance, I ran around saying I was god, and people got really pissy about that. But in fact I am god, like everything is in this world, in a Buddhist idea of it and in a quantum physics sense. However I couldn’t explain that at the time, and no one wanted me to anyway.

My morning thoughts anyway.

Hippocratic Oath

Short video about psychiatric abuse.

BOOKS!!!!

I’m doing a bit better today than yesterday. It really is amazing how much I’ve improved mainly from quitting my medication. I went to the bookstore today and got a whole bunch of stuff. I have Classics In Cree, a cd of songs like Amazing Grace and Wind Beneath My Wings all in Cree! I’m learning cree so learning it through music might work better for me. My Grampa’s writing up little lessons for me too, I have to practice those. I also got A Man Without A Country by Kurt Vonnegut, it’s sort of a collection of essays and thoughts and autobiographical details. I love his work, Slaughterhouse Five is my favorite anti-war novel. And his narrative style is so humourous, he basically starts out each story by telling you how it will end, you always know the destination. I also got Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond, who wrote Guns Germs and Steel. I loved Guns Germs and Steel so I’m looking forward to this one. It’s about great civilizations collapsing due to environmental catastrophes.

I remember in elementary school when we did our ongoing Save the Planet curriculum I had a nightmare that we were driving and I saw a hole in the sky, but it was like stars against a night sky exposed through this tear in blue sky. It scared the hell out of me. And that was in the late 80’s and still no one’s done anything to effectively counteract it.

I also got Identity And Violence: The Illusion of Destiny by Amartya Sen, which talks about how divisions in humankind have been marked with violence because of confused hatred. The cover has my favorite painting by David on it, Les Sabines. When I saw it at the Louvre I burst into tears. It’s huge and shows the Sabine women stopping a war between the Sabine men and the Roman men, because their children are a mix of Roman and Sabine. But there’s one kid, he looks about two or something, he’s the only figure in the painting who meets your gaze and he has such a haunted quality about him, like he’s totally aware that his identity is in conflict due to intertribal warfare and hatred. And it was like looking into my own eyes. I love that painting.

I also got a copy of Velcrow Ripper’s Scared Sacred, because it’s a really good film.

Now I have all kinds of things to read. I like reading on the internet, but there is something about a book, I dunno. And some people prefer library books, but I’m one of those people that just has to have books forever, because I like revisiting them. I’ll sometimes go back to a book just to read one paragraph again.

Someone online was talking about how we’re moving out of an era of specialization and back towards a respect for people with various knowledges. I hope that’s true. I think the compartmentalization of ideas and knowledge can be dangerous, it leads to reliance on too many different specialists, and a more global cohesive understanding of the world is lost. I know there are certain branches of knowledge I know more about than others, but I still, yeah, I’m a know it all. It’s good though, because you can apply things in an interdisciplinary way.

Some people were vaguely suspicious of me choosing to try for a graduate program outside of film, because it’s not really seen as what I should be doing or something. But I love ideas, and I feel like I can keep learning film outside of universities, and maybe it’s even better to learn outside of university. Not that I begrudge doing my undergraduate degree in film, I think that was a wise move. I did learn a lot, and I had a lot of fun, and the security guard laughed at me one day because I had a frame of 16mm taped to my forehead and I didn’t know it. Yep. I have fond memories of film school.

Anyway, I am alternating between mourning myself over the last four years, and being super excited about just being me for the rest of my life, without a diagnosis hanging over my head. I’m going to be okay. I’ll have some sad days though, and flashbacks, and I’m sure I’ll cycle through anger more than a few times. But as Toni Morrison says, Anger is good, there is a presence in anger.

Glimpses of the Higgs Boson (AKA God Particle)

We’re close to a unification theory, so exciting, oh my god! There’s been some advances in finding the Higgs Boson, I’ll explain this in laymans terms sometime when I have the time, but here’s a link to it.

Some people think spirituality isn’t supported by science. Au Contraire mon frere!

Mental Age, very silly

Do you remember way way back during the Ashley X posts I said how mental age was a really stupid thing? Well, I still think it is, but I was shocked to find out that they apply mental age to gifted people as well. I checked mine out according to the oh so scientific calculations. They tell me my mental age is 50!! What? I am like a 50 year old? That doesn’t make any sense, I know some fifty year olds and they can be really silly odd people. And then I think, well of course, I am also silly and odd. But really, I don’t think it means anything. Does it tell the general public more about me? “Yes, Thirza Cuthand is a 50 year old in the body of a 28 year old.” Pshaw!

I think that asynchronous development, whether that is people like my sister or people like me, takes you out of this mental age bullshit. We’re different, we are unmeasurable. I don’t think you can try to squish either my sister or I into these silly categories of mental age. I was really sad the other day and spent an hour getting hugged and tickled by my sister until she was sure I was okay, that’s a really wise thing to do. She has this incredible light about her, it transcends such a limited view as mental age. Her worker told us that she was in the Mendel Art Gallery and pointed out my video to the worker, she recognized I made it. This particular video doesn’t have my voice, or any images of me in it. But she knew I made it. She can also recognize our Dad’s artwork, and our Mom’s artwork. I know there’s something incredible going on in her head, something maybe so profound none of us can understand it. And I love her for that. She’s the coolest person I know.

It’s probably funny thinking both my sister and I ended up on far ends of the bell curve and still really care for each other and maybe even understand each other better because of it. I don’t know how it affected my mom’s parenting, I mean neither of us fit the developmental models of childhood at all so pretty much all the child rearing books were useless. The only thing Sky got on time for her age was her period, and I remember she was so proud of it, like finally she could look at me and say “Ha! Little smarty pants, I finally beat you to something!” I remember I learned to walk not long after she finally learned and she was so pissed off about it she kept pushing me over. Obviously we worked things out. And I was the one who spent two years advocating for her to have a pet cat, which she loved to pieces. I knew she loved cats, I didn’t understand cats much myself, but I knew she needed to have one. And he was her best friend for a long time, he died this past fall at the ripe age of eighteen.

I’ve decided to release my new video, Madness in Four Actions, on Youtube, hopefully tonight but maybe just sometime this weekend, I have to tweak a couple of things. It’s the first video I’ve made that has used mostly other people’s thoughts all collaged together. I did that for a reason, people often try to make my experience in the psych system an anomaly, or else just don’t believe me because I’m “crazy.” So I realized I had to tell my experience by using other people’s words for a change, so that people realize this is a larger issue than just me. I use my life experiences a lot, but I’ve always thought about them in the larger context, but sometimes people don’t see that and assume I’m being narccistic or something. Anyway, I am also going to be submitting that video to the usual distributors, but I think it’s important for me that it’s seen by a wider audience than just the people who go to festivals. And trust me, the screener copy will be of a way better quality than the Youtube version, it’s still worth it to see the original. I also used psychiatrists words a few times, contrarians like R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz, yes, but they have some insight AND the professional cred, and as horrid as it is to depend on professional cred, sometimes that’s the only way people recognize something as being valid. I personally think survivors stories are important, more important than psychiatrists assumptions about us, but there are a few folks in the system who actually know what they are talking about.

I’m thinking about something else too, and excuse the following run on sentence structure. Since this is a Level 1 society, since Primary Integration is highest in psychopaths and moderate in average people, since advanced development involves personal crisis which eventually leads to Level 5, and since that means divergent and original thinking which threatens the status quo and thus level 1 and thus psychopaths who have a good thing going . . . does that mean that mental health is being largely determined by psychopaths?

Chew on that!

Other misdiagnosis stories

I feel like I should add that misdiagnosis happens a lot in psychiatry, a lot of things can create mental health issues.

Brain tumour misdiagnosed as Schizophrenia.

Menopause misdiagnosed as bipolar disorder. Talks about the signs of menopause and the effects related to psychiatric drugs, including Akathisia from antidepressants, which is how I became diagnosed as manic.

Assorted Psychiatric Distortions from Amanda at Ballastexistenz, the experience of misdiagnosis and being a part of the psych survivor movement.

Political Dissendents diagnosed with “political monomania” and incarcerated in China, I hear this is also going on in Russia, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s also happening in the States or here. “The medical report states that at the time of his release Wang was still suffering from these allegedly dangerous psychiatric conditions. While suggesting that he was otherwise quite normal, the report notes: When the topic of conversation turns to politics his [mental] activities are still characterized by delusions of grandeur, litigation mania, and a conspicuously enhanced pathological will.” His treatment was chlorpromazine (aka Thorazine, which was also used on me).

Temporal Lobe Epilepsy can be misdiagnosed as bipolar disorder. This is written from a psych perspective, but I wanted to include it.

Various psychiatric survivor stories.

A discussion of the proposal to include Spiritual and Religious Problems in the DSM, including the history of psychiatry’s prejudice to religion and spirituality.

Abuse survivors misdiagnosed with various illnesses. As a rape survivor let me just say that being forced to spend 6 weeks in the company of a man who keeps attempting rape, well, it doesn’t fucking help now does it!!!

Psychiatric Abuse website including contacts to human rights groups for UK folks.

Will Hal’s Recovery Story and continued work in the psychiatric survivor movement. This story parallels some of mine.

Misdiagnosis and dual diagnosis of gifted children.

Okay, and just a funny side note, right now Itunes is playing Heart’s Crazy On You.

Meaningless Suffering

Things are . . . weird. I was hoping to god I would get off medication, go back to being me, and voila! Find myself happily at Secondary Integration and just be whoever the hell I am. Now I see I’m still in directed multilevel disintegration, which is, I dunno. No, it’s good, it’s just still pretty intense. I feel like my process has been held back four years. I know I have accomplished some things, but there’s still, I don’t know, SOMETHING. I’m still kind of afraid of leaving certain things behind, although I’m at the point of no return on that one. I didn’t realize how fucked up I would feel about the misdiagnosis thing. I mean, on one hand I’m really happy to figure out what the hell is actually the deal with me, but on the other hand it makes things very different, it means trying to find meaning in some pretty horrific stuff that happened because I was a psych patient.

Maher Arar is coming to Saskatoon in April to give a talk on Civil Liberties, I want to go see it. I wonder how he’s doing, what his healing process is looking like. And how does someone make meaning out of injustice? I don’t know.

I think I did find some meaning in all the shit I endured, but it got to the point where sticking with that diagnosis was quite literally going to kill me, even though I already felt kind of dead. And not “oh I’m crazy and broken” dead, more like medicated dead, take your pills, don’t rock the boat, all those terrible side effects are natural and you should just accept them.

The side effects were terrible. In fact, while my emotions feel intense again, it’s still thousands times better than being on medication. A lot of stuff which I had assumed was part and parcel of who I was turned out to have been med related, and I have no idea how to deal with that. I don’t hear things, don’t have seizures, I’m not shaking, I don’t get pounding sharp headaches, my body isn’t getting electrical zaps, my memory is pretty fuckin’ awesome again. I don’t know, I don’t know how to deal with the fact that I got majorly screwed over by the psych industry. And I don’t like being placed in a different category than my friends, in some ways I really miss the disabled label, as strange as that may sound. I spent so much time learning about bipolar disorder and struggling for the rights of other people with bipolar and now the diagnosis is wrong. How do I, arg! I hate that suddenly I’m a martyr, and I hate that suddenly people can say “Well psych wards were bad for you, because you were misdiagnosed, but they are fine for everyone else.” No! That’s not the message. I hate that suddenly positive disintegration is natural for me, but for other people it is still a mental disturbance. What the fuck?? That makes no sense at all.

The thing is in a lot of ways nothing has changed, my history is the same, I still experienced a psychotic episode, and I still have inner turmoil. And I’m still scared. I’m scared of people who don’t understand, or who kind of smirk when they find out I was in a bin. I’m scared people will start saying fucked up shit about crazy people to me because I’m not one of THOSE people anymore. Fuck. And even worse, I’m scared people will be so oblivious to what intelligence looks and sounds like that I’ll find myself in four point restraints again being given medication that eradicates my higher brain functioning and being forced to say thank you.

And the thing is, I understand pretty much all the people I knew in the psych ward. I didn’t see sickness, just a process they seemed to be undergoing. But once you get in that system, there is an idea of chronic “sickness.” Even if you do recover it’s just called remission, and it’s assumed it will always come back. I was always kind of suspicious of the diagnoses, but now I’m seeing that it’s a really limited way of looking at someone’s life. I know a lot of my friends in the psych system have histories of abuse, but it’s like people would rather give a pill to make those things go away than to help someone work through it. I have a friend who went to the ward because of rape trauma and she was specifically told not to seek counselling to deal with it. That happens a lot more than we would think.

I remember watching Jane Campion’s An Angel At My Table and when Janet Frame escapes lobotomy only after winning a major literary award, I felt kind of confused. I mean, she gets this letter that’s basically like “Sorry for the ECT, turns out you’re not schizophrenic,” and I always wondered how the hell she dealt with that. How do you create meaning out of torture and misunderstanding? And then, I can’t turn my back on all the other people I know who are being tortured. We still live in the dark ages.

The saddest thing is that through these four years of being a psych patient and doing research, I’ve discovered that not only is there no proof that brain chemicals have anything to do with what’s called mental illness, but the medications actually cause brain damage, and not only that but there have been various alternative treatment options that are proven to WORK, often far better than what’s being offered now, but they aren’t being offered because they don’t amass profit. And now family based lobby groups are advocating for all kinds of mental health “screening” so that people can be “treated.” Teen Screen down in the states would be one of them, and it is FUCKED UP. Basically teenagers, who are all fucked up just because that’s what happens in adolescence, fill in a questionnaire and then are “assessed” based on their answers.

I’m really sad. I missed out on four years of my life because I was all drugged up with antipsychotics and antimanic medication. How the fuck to I give that any meaning? And where the hell do I go from here?

I currently have a pet theory on what I call Atomic Thinking and Subatomic Thinking. It needs to be fleshed out a bit more, but it deals with Atomic Level thinking, or what we see in the usual world according to classical physics. And then there’s Subatomic Level thinking, which is more concerned with the unseen, the reality underlying this one where the laws of physics completely changes. I think in psychiatry we’ve applied Atomic level thinking to Subatomic level crises. R.D. Laing talked once about a patient who told him she was Switzerland, and instead of acting like she was spewing rubbish he gave it some serious thought, considered the military/political state of Switzerland, and realized she was essentially saying “I am freedom.” Or basically, a desire for freedom. And I think he was right. People need to learn to be more creative in thinking about what crazy people are saying. It makes sense if you think about what people say, if you’re open to the fact that there are leaps in thinking patterns but that they are not random.

And then of course I still have personal issues I’m working through, and that is hard. I have an easier time being victimized than standing up for myself, and I don’t know if that’s because I was taught to think that way or if that’s really the way I am. I’m so confused.

Lots to think about. Lots to cry about.

Trusting Oneself

I was raised to be a nicey nice person I think, or I wanted to emulate it. God it’s difficult! I think that some people assume having some kind of spiritual consciousness means letting go of fury at injustice and oppression and it’s so not true. I’m starting to read a new book which I’m really excited about, called The Politics Of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted, by Obery M. Hendricks. I started reading it last night but I was fretting about some interpersonal stuff that happened earlier in the day so I wasn’t absorbing it as well as I wanted to. I’ll try again today. But I am interested by this process of co-opting liberating revolutionary thought and reintegrating it to fit the ruling elite’s dogma. It happens all the time, in all religions and philosophies including First Nations spirituality. I think maybe part of it is that people have a hard time accessing a variety of sources and drawing their own conclusions, it’s a lot more comforting to draw from one source and make it fit with something you maybe already decided.

I didn’t want to believe in Jesus. I do now. But I don’t call myself a Christian, and I don’t consider it the One True Way. I think he’s a fascinating revolutionary figure who has been co-opted by the dominant paradigm. I want to know who he is and what he thought, not what other people decided he thought. But reading about Jesus and his life was the step towards open mindedness that I had to take, which doesn’t mean it’s everyone’s step. I kind of threw him away before, based mainly on fundamentalism. Now I see it differently, learning about him taught me a lot, mostly how to think for myself. I was raised pretty liberal, but that also meant I wasn’t supposed to investigate ideologies which were utilized in the name of power and control over the population. But I think that’s precisly why I wanted to learn about him, in the end. Not that I want to have some kind of biblical quotation show down with Fred Phelps and Billy Graham, fuck that would suck ass. I hope to learn about Islam next, I know some things about it, but not a lot. I know Mohammed had some really feminist ideas, and that’s exciting. He also thought Jesus was a cool dude, which is sweet.

I know there’s some thoughts out there that Jesus is actually based on an early Phoenician myth, (it it Phoenician? I can’t find my source to cite) which supposedly means if that’s true then I shouldn’t give a damn about Jesus. But even if he is a mythical figure who has been reconcieved, that doesn’t mean the story doesn’t have relevance. Pan’s Labyrinth is a mythical story, but it had a lot of relevance to me. I feel like an Ophelia in a world of Captain Vidals.

I didn’t really want to devote this whole post to Jesus though. I actually just wanted to talk about learning to think for myself.

Tangent:

It’s Schrodinger’s birthday tomorrow, he is a year old! And a bad kitty! I had some triscuits by my bed from when I was sick and watching movies all day and he’s been eating them. Which isn’t so bad, except he’s eating them in my bed. So I’ll go downstairs and get into bed and find a crumbled up pile of triscuit crumbs. Such a mess. Anyway, last night I was fretting and he came along and climbed over the clock radio to get a triscuit (yes, I’ll clean them up eventually) and then he went away. And I was fretting about something and then as I was laying awake in the dark I looked at the clock and it said 4:47. And I was like “What! Have I been worrying for that long!?” And i got kind of weird feeling, like I couldn’t trust my perception of time even and I went to sleep and I woke up and the clock said 10:00 so I got up and dressed and went upstairs to feed all the animals and it was pitch black outside. I was so confused, and the clock upstairs read 6:00. And the funny thing is it did feel like 6 in the morning, but I wasn’t trusting myself, I was going by what my alarm clock said, even though my alarm clock had been altered by Schrodinger’s desire to eat triscuits.

Schrodinger is having a birthday party on Saturday. I’ve never gone to a birthday party for a cat, but a little boy who got two of his brothers has organized a family reunion of kitties, I have no idea what to expect. If Schrodinger turns into a big bully and beats up all his siblings we’ll have to put him in his kennel for the party. I’ve never seen cats reunited, I don’t know if they forget each other or not, but I guess I will find out.