A few of my friends figure that a lot of my misery is due to the fact that I think way too much. Which, to an extent, is probably true. I am known to drill down into esoteric topics with an intensity that is typically reserved for life-and-death scenarios or the machinations of the criminally insane. (To all of you not in medical school, the following will mean essentially nothing, but, for example, on my OBGYN rotation, I was assigned the topic of gestational trophoblastic neoplasia, and I totally got into it, much to the surprise of the attending physician. Or, for something less esoteric but more horrifically geeky, how I deconstructed "The Matrix Reloaded" with A and E at Potbelly's today, and discussed what separates it/makes it inferior to the original movie, and how it compares as a trilogy to the original "Star Wars" trilogy. I will not write down my quasi-profound statements, because, well, I do realize that no one cares. At least, no one should care for God's sake. Then, as a final example, there was my long-drawn out explanation last night with R, Y, and JM of the theory of the Omega Point and how God may well be a physical phenomenon that can be represented as the sum-total of all the information in the Universeâ€â€that was a doozy. Granted, for this final one, my mind was certifiably alteredâ€â€I certainly wouldn't've been able to operate any heavy machinery at the time I had this discussion.)

So, yeah, maybe, maybe, I've got classic flight-of-ideas right now. Maybe I am having a medication-induced hypomanic episode. I've been thinking quite a lot lately. But it hasn't been bad. It hasn't been necessarily good either, but I feel like I'm sorting through a lot of shit that I've sort of left on the backburner to fester for all this time.

So maybe it's just the medication talking, but, I mean, I've been trying to think my way out. It didn't used to work very well before. Thinking would just get me into these horrible metaphysical pits of neverending despair, and for a long time, what I wanted to do was just stop thinking, and go through life mechanically. Stimulus and response. Whatever happens, happens. So of course, this meant drinking copious quantities of alcohol, and it worked at first. It's very hard to think deep, dark, depressing thoughts when you're extraordinarily drunk, mostly because it's simply hard to think, period. But, alas, the liver adapts to the poisons you consume, and in time, it was less and less effective. It got to the point where I could take four shots of tequila in rapid succession and, instead of collapsing into a sodden heap, I would just continue to fret at how futile my life was.

Thinking these things made me tired, and I just wanted to curl up in a little ball and lie there.

Not so now. Admittedly, a lot of the thoughts flitting through my head are extraneous and hardly worthy of discussion. (I am a man who lives for tangents.) But there are key things that I used to believe about myself that would just send me in a depressive nose dive that don't bother me so much now. Not that these things have changed. It's just that my attitude towards them have changed. I no longer think to myself: how horrible, I am just so screwed. I also don't pull a nihilistic defense mechanism: ah, fuck it, it's all fucked up, but who cares, I'll survive. Right now, it's just acceptance: OK. This is how things are. Some things I can change, some things I will have to deal with. So it goes.

I dunno. There are two things that I have come to realize about myself just recently. One, I am a drama queen. (But if you've been following this blog, this may already be readily apparent.) Two, I am a control freak. This second thing is most disturbing because for all these years I have been carefully crafting this persona of being completely at ease with chaos, and projecting myself as this laid-back guy who was carefree and who was hard to ruffle. And, really, this is what I want to be. But I'm not. Of course, this isn't control freakishness in the classic Type-A personality way. I mean, hell, I am disorganized beyond all recognizable belief, and schedules are sort of more guidelines for me than hard and fast rules. But there are certain conditions that have to be met, otherwise, I am ill-at-ease. I am trying to let of this, but sometimes, I wonder if this isn't just my underlying personality that I have to get used to.

In Other News

I gave into my dark side and purchased a digital camera. (How will I ever pay it, you ask? Well, not anytime soon, I can guarantee you that.) I never really appreciated how dangerous it was to try to take pictures as one is driving on the expressway, but I had to play with it. Since I jetted from the hospital in Park Ridge really early on Friday, I decided to have fish tacos at Baja Fresh all the way in La Grange (a good 20 miles) and then I swung back up to the Loop, trying to take pictures of the Chicago skyline. My rationalization is that this is most likely (I haven't ruled out remote possibilities yet) my last year in Chicago, and I don't have any pictures. The last picture I took was like four years ago. Hell, I've never really owned a camera, ever. Mehmoreeez, at the corner of my mind....