Category Archives: LiveJournal Imports

Day 1

8 pints and 1 Alaskan Cod later, it’s time to fall asleep to Confessions Of A Knife on the $10/h hotel-room jukebox.

If I sent you any embarrassing emails, I apologize. If I haven’t yet sent you any embarrassing emails, I apologize. (I promise to get to you soon.)

See you tomorrow!

Sensory Sensitivities

I had my first EEG session yesterday. This was the baseline evaluation, so nothing terribly interesting happened. 6 electrodes are attached to my head, plus three clamps on my earlobes — two to monitor background electrical signals (which will be subtracted from the signal sent by the electrodes), plus one ground. Close your eyes for a minute. Look over here for a minute. Read this page for a minute. Move electrodes. Look this way. Listen to these words. Move electrodes. Repeat these numbers. Repeat these numbers backwards.

We talked briefly about the results of the tests from my last visit, and while the results are more nuanced than I’m describing here, there were two things that stood out very strongly in the results: Hypervigilance, and traumatic stress.

‘Traumatic stress’ is similar to its big brother, post-traumatic stress disorder, but isn’t nearly of the same magnitude and effect. As an emotional condition, however, the fundamentals are the same, and neither of us were very surprised to see this in the results.

I wasn’t familiar with hypervigilance, but it’s a fairly straightforward condition to understand; imagine you get robbed and beaten in an alley downtown at night. Now imagine how you feel the next time you’re in that alley at night. That state, where you’re overly conscious of where you are and what you’re doing (and likely to have an exaggerated reaction if a stranger started walking down the alley toward you) is hypervigilance. It’s an extended form of fight-or-flight — and is what I’ve likely been living for the last 2-3 years.

These two conditions are usually caused by extended and acute physical pain, or periods of extreme stress. In my situation, I had both. (The level of stress was so high that I actually developed a facial twitch which lasted for the greater part of a year.)

I’m in Vancouver all next week on business, so the neurofeedback proper will start Monday after next. If yesterday’s EEG results confirm the hypervigilance, we’ll likely start working on that first, as a precursor to working on the more generalized stress.

Is your favourite TV sport the High Jump?

Went in for my first session with the psychologist today, spending the whole time running through those behavioural psychology tests everyone’s done a hundred times. (Are you easily distracted from tasks? Do you have more trouble sleeping lately? Do you feel like someone is putting thoughts in your head?)

A lot of these were more interesting than I expected, and they ended up in a nice chart mapping out which parts of my brain are presumed to have more activity, based on some magic set of rules I didn’t see. The results seemed to make sense, which is encouraging.

With that said, it was troubling to answer some of the questions, because the honest answer (and the answer I’ve been living for two years or so) is so far removed from what I’ve answered every other time I’ve done these tests over the years, and equally removed from my own perception of who Jairus is. Jairus isn’t someone who prefers avoiding crowds, or gets upset easily. Jairus doesn’t stay up at night worrying about things he can’t control.

…or at least, Jairus didn’t, for most of his life. This just brings into focus how far away I am from who I used to be, and who I want to be.

peace through superior somatosensory cortices

I’m not happy. I haven’t been happy for quite some time. This should not come as any surprise to long-term readers of this space.

In my ongoing quest for emotional peace, I will be starting a type of therapy known as neurotherapy (or alternatively, neuro-biofeedback). The basic idea is simple: To allow for conscious control of brainwave activity, to maximize, minimize, or normalize alpha/theta/beta waves as is appropriate.

This is done by monitoring EEG patterns in realtime with a computer (and a clinical psychologist), and interacting with the computer through a game (or a puzzle, or a task) so that when the desired brainwave changes happen, you get closer to winning the game (or solving the puzzle). Through operant conditioning, the more I play, the more time I spend at these states, and the easier it is to maintain these states when I’m not playing.

In short, the goal is to hack my brain so that I’m able to think and feel the way I want to think and feel.

I’m going to be keeping a log of the sessions, cognitive changes I notice, and my emotional state in general. This will also include a not-insignificant amount of personal information, memories of teenaged depression, why Effexor is the devil, and so on.

I don’t want to dump this on people who’re expecting old cartoons, dorky humor, and pictures of my cat. So, if you’d like to be on the filter for this, let me know. All comments are screened.

Otherwise, we will soon return to our regularly scheduled programming.

All Apologies

I was wrong about Game Of The Year, dear reader. So wrong.

It’s not Mass Effect, even though it’s the first game that’s ever made me miss Star Control 2.
It’s not Portal, even though GLaDOS is the best villain since Sephiroth.
…and it’s not Bioshock, even though it has the perhaps the best boss fight (Ryan, not the other one) in the history of RPGs.

It is not any of those brilliant, beautiful games which have brought me countless hours of enjoyment this year.

It’s Rock Band.

4W/6E

While I was there, I lived for the quiet moments of shared space with other people, but now I mostly remember the sounds and the smells — like how the floor would go dark and quiet after lockup, and what the wooden spoons they used to give you with ice cream would taste like.

You couldn’t keep them, of course. Too many girls had driven splinters into their arms, and so the orderlies made sure they were all collected after we finished eating.

When they’d let us, we’d go to the games room to play pool and listen to music. We only had a few tapes, and we played them over and over until they were so worn and thin it sounded like we were underwater. Whenever I hear any of that music today — Fixed, Unplugged in New York — I’m always amazed at how crisp and full it sounds.

…

Hurry home, Spring.

Exmas

Skip this post if you don’t like reading about religion.

…

I’m not a big fan of the holiday season, as I might’ve maybe mentioned. Once or twice.

I’m not religious. I’ll see my mom on Christmas Eve, but I don’t have a tree at home, and I don’t often give gifts. I do observe the winter solstice, but it’s much more of an observation than it is a celebration, and my head isn’t in the game as much as it was when I was younger and wiser. I was, however, raised Roman Catholic, and as a child I was deeply religious. I attended Catholic school, weekly mass, and received the sacraments; Confirmation, the Eucharist, the Sacrament of Penance… I sang in the Church Choir, and I was an Altar Boy. (I hear they’re called Altar Servers now, but we didn’t let girls in the club back then.)

Anyway.

All of this to say that I have a fairly solid understanding of Catholicism, and although it seems I’m in the minority in this, my experiences with it were very positive.

To be clear, I’m not saying Catholicism itself is positive, or making any statement about religion proper, just my own experience with it.

I was lucky enough to have churches and schools full of priests and teachers who were mostly bright and caring. Most importantly, they placed a sharp focus on deriving moral direction from the bible itself, rather than any overarching Church dogma. It’s a cliche, but it almost always came down to the question, “what would Jesus do?”

…and the thing about JC (we go way back) is that he’s a really great person to draw lessons from, and if most Christians paid any attention to what he said, the world would be a much better place. None of the hot-topic religious issues in public debate today (abortion, ‘the gay’, etc) get more than a dozen lines in the bible. No one cares about them. Jesus certainly doesn’t care about them. There are thousands and thousands of verses and sermons on peacemaking, community and forgiveness, but the most clear message in all of the bible is on poverty. When a rich man asked Jesus what he needed to do to get into heaven, Jesus told him that rich people don’t go to heaven, so he needed to sell all his worldly shit and give the money to the homeless.

Anyway.

All of this to say that this is the only time of year in which the public celebration of a religious holiday actually makes me angry. You’ve got families spending thousands of dollars on themselves and their friends in the spirit of giving, hyperextended retail hours, credit limit raises and extra loans — millions of Canadians showing their holiday spirit by buying, buying, buying.

If you’re celebrating Christmas this year, try giving to the people you won’t see every day, who aren’t your family or coworkers or friends you get drunk with. There are a lot of very, very cold people downtown who could use a coffee, a hot meal, or some warm gloves and thermal socks.

It’s the Christian thing to do.

And if, like me, you’re not Christian, then you shouldn’t need a 2,000 year old dead guy to tell you it’s the right thing to do.

AVS

Thank you, everyone who came out on Tuesday. I always manage to work myself into a big freaky stressball before playing Zaphods, but I was totally blown away by how many people came out to support the show. Even though there were technical problems, everyone was still on the dancefloor and cheering 10 minutes later after we got everything working again. And 15 minutes after that when we got it working again, again.

A megathanks to Nick, for asking Synkro and I to join him on stage for his final performance in a very long, long time. I don’t remember the last time I had that much fun.

…

I think I’ve managed to come down with a throat infection since the show. I’ve taken today and yesterday away from work, and I’m cancelling my tattoo appointment for today. If this keeps getting worse before it gets better, I’ll have to postpone Deck[ard] The Halls. Right now I’m in that cough/sinus medication limbo where you’re not sure if you’re exhausted or not, and you’re not sure how much pain you’re in, and anything more complex than making toast is an absurd impossibility.

…

Time for some toast.