Talk Thursday: Time Has Come Today

Well, it seems my hyperfertility is at an end. It always ends; that's the trouble with hyperfertility. It ends, and then I look back on the 70-odd pages I wrote when it was in full swing and ask myself what the f____ I thought I was doing. Obviously they're crap and need to be thrown out. (True? Probably not, but I'm mopey now so that's the first thought.) Whether or not they get thrown out, though, time has resumed its normal speed. Which is to say, time has come today. Or so the Talk Thursday topic-o-meter tells me.

The song, by the way, is by the Chambers Brothers, redone by the Ramones and the lyrics can be found here. I don't get it. I don't get lots of songs, so this doesn't particularly bother me, but I try to actually get Talk Thursday topics so I can write about them in a way that makes sense. I do get time travel, though. It has to do with space travel. It was good old Einstein who figured out that the passage of time depends entirely on where you are standing. Toss a ball on a moving train, for example, and it will take much less time to travel 100 feet than the same tossed ball on a stationary train platform. Toss the same ball on a rocket ship moving at near the speed of light, and the ball doesn't take any time at all to travel the hundred feet. In short, the ball travels back in time and arrives before it was tossed. Yep. I get that, no problem.

Where the whole time travel thing starts breaking down for me is in movies that use it for a plot device. This is where I need my sister, who always pinpoints the plot holes. Take, for example, the Christopher Reeve movie Time After Time. (Please.) Christopher Reeve's character receives a watch as a present from an old woman, which he then takes back in time and gives to the woman when she was young. My sister pointed out that the watch could never have in fact existed, because if she didn't get it before Christopher Reeve gave it to her when she was young, and he didn't get it before she gave it to him when she was old, then where, pray tell, did it actually come from? The watch is trapped in a Schroedinger's riddle of existence. One of these days the movie director will open the box and find out the watch was dead the whole time.

Perception of time also varies from person to person. One minute means very different things in, say, a football game versus waiting for the results of a home pregnancy test. Yesterday our server went down at work (nice servers shouldn't go down) and the afternoon was a lot longer than our afternoons normally get. In fact, by three o'clock I'm sure it was normally at least four-thirty on any other day. Once I'd done all my filing and boxed up the old files and cleaned off my desk and done some professional reading, what else was there, you know? Rearrange the file cabinet, I guess. By which time it was still only four. Time stood still. I needed Christopher Reeve's watch.

When I'm hyperfertile, time gallops forward at a ridiculous pace, and the only way to keep up is to run alongside as fast as possible. Everything's faster. I even type faster. Then it ends and everything slows back down to a normal pace, which is like a crawl in comparison. Kind of like going 90 mph on the freeway (which I'm sure none of you would ever, ever do) and then slowing back down to the speed limit. Yeah, you're still traveling at an insane pace, faster than any of our ancestors ever dreamed possible, but it feels so slow.

And so, slowly, I am wrapping my brain around my work-in-progress and figuring out that A. the last 70 pages may or may not be crap (is that cat alive or dead?), B. I have no idea how to end this thing, C. I probably need to do another draft and maybe more than one, and D. Caesar the Cat makes a great editor, but a human being might be needed as well. Which is not much comfort at seven in the morning. Time has come today. Time!

Talk Thursday: Wants; Needs; Must (Do)s

Now there's an interesting topic for somebody who's basically been avoiding all of the above for the past several days--well, okay, at least a week. Oh, don't get me wrong--I'm still swimming, getting to work and getting the basic chores done around the house--but I'm not getting much of anything else accomplished. Seems that the mysterious affliction known as hyperfertility, which attacks only people named Jen and which I'd kind of despaired of ever having again now that I'm (ahem) Being Treated For My Condition, isn't completely gone after all. In fact I'm on quite the tear at the moment. I've cranked out something like 60 pages of the current work-in-progress in the last two weeks, and at the rate I'm galloping along I might actually have the book done by the end of the month. Which would be all kinds of awesome; I'd have two books to flog around instead of just one, and that would give me a cheap excuse to become a paying member on Querytracker. Not that I need an excuse, technically, but I think I may have mentioned I have fiscal anorexia? I don't spend money unless I have an excuse. And it has to be a cheap excuse because--yeah.

What is hyperfertility, you ask. Well, hyperfertility is where for whatever reason, I can't frick'n stop writing. It usually happens right around the time I'm most likely to get pregnant (and I doubt that's a coincidence), and it also happens to co-exist with mania. I'm not truly manic in that sense (yes, I'm still snarfing down my USRDA of pills), but a little bit hypomanic? Yeah, I'd cop to that. Still, I'm not staying up to all hours of the night and I'm not talking a mile a minute (though I do, for some reason, have the lyrics to ABBA's "Fernando" stuck in my head). My doc and I just tinkered around with one of my doses of something or other to fix an issue with something or other else, and that may have set this off; he says not to worry, give it a few weeks and everything will straighten out. To which I thought, "A couple of weeks! Great, that's enough time to finish the book!"

Wrong answer, right? Well, hey, it's the one I've got.

So on the wants list, I've got falling by the wayside beading, TV of pretty much any kind (though I managed to catch "House" on Monday), any serious pursuit of anything else, and any cooking of anything that takes more than ten minutes. I've been recruited as a betafish for The Sekrit Projekt (google that; I'm not even gonna try to explain) and I've only been over there once. On the needs list, I'm managing to keep up with the chores, but I haven't mowed the lawn yet this year, nor have I had the blades sharpened on the mower. I also haven't done anything about having the exterminator come by, the gas man check out the stove, or the washing machine guy come fix the balance issue. And as for the must dos--well, I'm getting to work every day and I'm working on work stuff while I'm there. But I always do that. Even when I'm fatally distracted, I'm pretty good at doing my job.

(Yes, I'm also bathing and doing the laundry. I have certain standards, ya know.)

The last time I was hyperfertile, which was almost a year ago, I just typed like mad and waited for it to pass. And it did. I have a feeling I'll be doing the same thing this time. The lawn, the stove, the washing machine and all that will still be around when it does. Which isn't to say some people won't be impatient with me, such as a certain person with whom I reside. Uh, sorry, sweetie. But I'm keeping up with the chores, right? Right?

Talk Thursday: Winning

We're a competitive species, homo sapiens. Probably because we needed to be, from the time we were hanging around in caves and telling stories around campfires (no, not last week at Carlsbad Caverns; I'm talking aeons ago.) He who ran the fastest and threw the spear the hardest (the alpha male) got the mammoth, fed the family and lived to die another day. He who didn't (the beta male) got the leftovers after the alpha male got himself killed. (Which might have included three or four bereaved widows. Hm, doesn't sound like such a bad deal.) But this competitive streak became ingrained in our DNA, and now to this day, we still talk about winners and losers as though spears and mammoths (and bereaved widows) are at stake.

For a book-length discussion of alpha and beta males, check out A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore. For a blog post on winners and losers that you can read in five minutes, soldier on. To be called a loser, especially in the corporate world or that miniature corporate world, the first-grade playground, is to be permanently branded as one of the worst things imaginable. Losers don't get the fame, the glory, the girl, or the kickball for the next round. Winners get all that stuff, plus they are usually also taller, better-looking and have nicer hair. Everybody wants to be on the winning side, ignoring the fact that there has to be a losing side or the winning side would have no meaning whatever. Aside: In high school marching band, the flag corps instructor was telling the ladies not to put their palms up on a diagonal sweep because in flag-corps language, that meant the country had just lost a war, and the U.S. has never lost a war. As quickly as I could I said, "Uh, Vietnam, Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua." She looked at me as though I were terminally stupid and said, "Those were just police actions."

Anyway: As a Buddhist I should not care one whit if I win or lose at anything, since it has no meaning in the greater context of reality and in fact serves as a distraction from the truer need to have compassion for all, but because it's encoded in my DNA, I do, of course. It rankles me when Joan kicks my butt at Scrabble (and she practically always does; if I win it's a fluke). I'm always relieved when we reach a good settlement for a client at work, because a good settlement is the same as winning and then we aren't faced with the all-or-nothing of a courtroom battle. Every year I get perversely interested in the Oscar campaigns, not because I can stomach sitting through the world's stupidest presentation show but because on some level I'll have picked a favorite that I want to win, and I'll be glad/unhappy if he/she wins/loses. (Hallie Stanfield was robbed. I'm just sayin'.)

And then we get to Charlie Sheen, who's not bipolar but "bi-winning", and the whole blog post breaks down and takes off in another direction.

Hang around a psychiatrist's office long enough and you'll start armchair-diagnosing everyone you see. I do it and I'm not proud of that fact. And okay, Charlie may be "bi-winning" and not bipolar but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. Check out a couple of my posts written under the influence of what I used to call hyperfertility and you'll get a sense of what's maybe going on in Charlie's head. (I didn't know what it was then. Nobody shoot me.) I'm not a professional with several letters after my name, and even if I were I'd hesitate to say for certain without talking to the guy at some length, but darned if a lot of the symptoms aren't right there. Even the substance abuse. No, especially the substance abuse--bipolar disorder and drugs/alcohol go hand in hand. It's called self-medicating. Bipolar also tends to run in families. (Me: Four alcoholic grandparents. Yep, four for four. What are the odds?)

Charlie, honey, you're breaking my heart. Don't sweat the whole winning/losing thing; you've made your point, abundantly, in the mass media. Now please go see somebody. Do it now, before you crash, and maybe you won't have to crash. You're so much more fun when you're stable. I'm so serious about this that I'll even follow you on Twitter to prove it.

Me and five million of my closest friends.

Hyperfertility Mystery Solved!!

Playing in the background: The ceiling fan. On second thought let's crank up Pandora, here. Okay, Sea and Silence by Deuter. Liking that.

My rabid fans are no doubt aware that for some time now I've been having these fits of hyperfertility. The most screamingly obvious was back in May, when I camped out in front of my laptop for a solid holiday weekend and wrote something like 80 pages of Soulmender. What is hyperfertility, you ask? Well, that's when I feel like working nonstop for days, hardly bothering with such niceties as food and sleep. Or having nonstop sex, but this being a religious establishment and all that, I don't talk about that part in public. In one of my more infamous episodes, I cranked out the end of Part the Second of the Almighty Trilogy in an eighteen-hour sprawl of wordplay that had me forget to get up and get a bottle of water and then wonder, two hours later, why I was thirsty. I call it hyperfertility because it seems to hit right around the time I'm most likely to get pregnant, and because I feel like if a male came within about 100 yards of me, he'd have an excellent chance of knocking me up. Luckily, the only male around is Caesar and he is neutered. (By the way, you can follow Caesar on Twitter: @carpefelem)

Well, after the Soulmender incident, I got to thinking that this maybe wasn't quite normal. I mean, writing is temporary insanity, but, you know, telling myself I'll sleep an extra hour so it's okay to stay up until 11:30 or midnight when I know full well I'm gonna get up at 5 anyway and go to the pool, and then do it again the next night, because the more sleep deprived I am, the longer the hyperfertility lasts, is, you know, probably not all that good for me. The copious amounts of caffeine and sugar that keep it going are also probably not the greatest.

So as one of the hyperfertile fits was winding down, I went to see my doc for my Annual Exam (TM). And she asked me how I was doing and, for some strange reason, I leveled with her. And she asked me how long I'd been having manic episodes. And I said, about a year now but probably longer than that and did you just call them manic episodes? (She had.) Manic as in manic depression? (Yep, only we call it bipolar disorder these days.) Are you serious? (She was.) Well, crap, what does that mean?

Well, it meant that she was gonna port me off to a psychiatrist. And again for some strange reason, I went along with this. What's more, I wrote up a brief history of the Jeniverse, including my previous experiences with psychiatry (which began when I was five) and odd behavior among my family members (most specifically my grandparents, all four of whom, though dearly beloved, were a piece of work.) Being the paralegal that I am, I even faxed it over to the psychiatrist before the appointment. I mean, just in case, you know? It didn't necessarily have to be bipolar disorder. It could just be, you know, genetically enhanced weirdness.

So the psychiatrist, who was very nice, greeted me as, "You're the one who sent the fax, right? Boy, I wish everyone would do that. It sure made my job a lot easier." She then asked me a whole bunch of questions, some of which were bizarre ("Name the last three Presidents." Crap. Okay, there was George W. and was there a world before then?) and some of which were just spooky. "Do you wake up a lot during the night?" "Do you have a history of alcohol abuse or heavy drinking?" "Did you have thoughts of suicide before you turned 13?" How does she know these things? Hmm, she must be psychic. Maybe she's a mindbender. Maybe she's related to Roland and I should get out of here right now because - oh, right. Reality break, Jen. Sorry about that.

Anyway, when the smoke cleared and the dust settled she told me not only did I Have It but that I'd probably Had It my whole life. They know a lot more than they did in the 1970s, when I began my couch trip and when the idea of a bipolar child was unheard of. Now they know that not only can children be bipolar but they're catching them at the ages of three and four. Back then kids were more likely to be diagnosed with ADD, or "hyperactivity" which was what it was called. (Hyperactivity. Hyperfertility. Hmm.) What's more, they know it's genetic for a fact. If you don't have the genetic marker, you can't get it. And since all four of my grandparents had Serious Issues, it's entirely possible I got a quadruple dose. Or at least I got it from both parents, by way of their parents. "If you had children, I'd be telling you to watch your kids like a hawk," she said. (Nope, no kids. Hyperfertility notwithstanding.)

Cliches aside, What Does All This Mean? Well, firstly it means I've been very lucky. Bipolar disorder usually gets worse, not better over time. I've already been doing a lot of the things they'd tell me to do; exercise frequently, meditate, hot baths (jacuzzi, natch), massage therapy. I've also been self-medicating for years (booze and food, in that order; I quit drinking four years ago and started going to OA two years ago and gee, the symptoms just turned up out of nowhere, didn't they?) Secondly, it means I'll be taking some med or another for a very long time, probably forever, and visiting the doc often to get Checked Up Uponst. I'll need to keep a journal, track my moods, stay away from situations that stress me out. "But really," she said, "it's not that different than monitoring diabetes."

So I've been thinking about that, and I think she's right. In diabetes, your pancreas produces abnormal chemistry. In bipolar, your brain produces abnormal chemistry. With diabetes, you monitor your blood sugar levels,take certain meds, exercise, eat certain meals at certain times, and avoid some foods, including alcohol and excess sugar. With bipolar, you do all of that (monitoring moods instead of blood sugar levels) plus hot baths, massage and plenty of sleep. No more late night writing binges. No more staying up till 11 to watch Surviving Disaster (Dammit!!) I've already got a diabetic in the house, so I'm following most of the rules as it is. And Joan likes massages, too.

Notwithstanding, I'm A LITTLE FREAKED OUT RIGHT NOW, THANKEWVERYMUCH. There's something about going from a diagnosis of major depression, which most people get (everyone feels down once in a while) to bipolar disorder, which most people don't get. I mean, depression's normal. Bipolar - well, that's crazy. Maybe not walking down the street muttering to no one in particular and every once in a while announcing I'm God crazy, but still, crazy. So I'm trying to get over that. And I'm reading lots of books and scanning the Internet and trying to Connect With My Peer Group, which, to be honest, I've always sucked at. And strange as this sounds, I'm kind of mourning my lost hyperfertility. As not-good-for-me as it certainly was, it was a lot of fun.

Friday Frights (on Sunday) and Hyperfertility

Playing in the background: Episode of "House." The guy just never gets old.

For once I got Joan to come with me to a Friday Frights - mainly because I picked a Disney movie, but that's okay, she's good company. We saw Race to Witch Mountain at the dollar theater and it rates an AWESOME. (That's four stars for those of you that count stars - and yes, I've been known to go up to five.) Sarcasm, Star Wars in-jokes, Whitley Streiber appears as himself and, oh yeah, the movie was one long car chase. I'm liking Dewayne Johnson more and more as an actor. And was it a deep, profound, socially significant flick that alters our view of ourselves and our place in the universe? Uh, no. But it was tremendously entertaining. Highly recommended. I'm just sayin'.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, it's the New Moon and yours truly has been hit with her monthly attack of hyperfertility. IF YOU ARE MALE AND YOU COME WITHIN 300 YARDS OF ME IN THE NEXT TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, THERE'S AN EXCELLENT CHANCE YOU WILL KNOCK ME UP. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. Not having a male (besides Caesar the Neutered Cat) within three hundred yards of me, though, I've been writing like crazy. 11,000 words in the last three days. Three complete chapters and parts of a few more.

This is one of the more awesome things that could befall a writer, and it even picked a convenient three-day weekend to happen. (Yes, I've been unemployed for a while now, but I've had a temp gig for the past week and I'm going back on Tuesday.) I don't know if it happens to everybody, but I can pretty much set my watch on it. Stuck on a tough chapter? No problem, call me back in four weeks. And don't ask me to do anything more complex than minor editing two weeks after that.

In fact, my only real complaint with this hyperfertility thing is that I get high. What's wrong with getting high, you ask. Well, nothing, except that I like it, and I want to keep it going as long as possible. When it starts to ebb, I don't want to eat (except sugar) or sleep (except naps) because being speedy and sleep-deprived lets me hang onto it a little bit longer. Keep doing this long enough and you will eventually die. It's like, say, powering a laptop with lightning bolts. Fun while it lasts, but then you need a new laptop and I've only got the one.

Anyway, I've been knee-deep in Soulmender (Mindbender Part Three) most of the weekend which was why Joan suggested the movie. I think she was afraid I'd forget the rest of the world existed. So naturally we went to see a movie about two kids in trouble, running from law enforcement and a scary assassin. I mean, you gotta appreciate the irony.

BTW, like how I came full circle on that one?

Writing As Temporary Insanity. Discuss.

Playing in the background: The soothing sudsy noise of the washing machine.
Meters swum today: None. Overslept. But I'll probably ride my bike down around the lake later.

Repeat 100 times: I Will Not Write Under The Influence of Politics. I Will Not Write Under The Influence Of Politics. I Will Not...well, you get the idea. Having calmed down a little and wiped the foam off my face, and in the clearer light of - uh, midafternoon, I can see how that image about the severed head might have upset a few people. I'll offer no apologies but I will say That's Not Normally Like Me. Brahma vijara maitri and all that.

Thing is, almost all writing is done under the influence of something. Sane sober people hardly ever see the need to sit at a keyboard and type all day for something they may not even get paid for. There are all these jokes about alcoholic poets (I like the one where the poet, sobering up after a long night with the quill, refuses a cup of the blood of life, that is, my favorite stimulant, saying, "Certainly not. Coffee is for novelists.") and of course lots of real writers were serious hardcore addicts of one form or another. Wilde (booze, inflated ego), Poe (booze), Hemingway (pretty much anything he could get his hands on but mainly booze), Hunter S. Thompson (I think heroin mostly), Bret Easton Ellis (God only knows), Anne McCaffrey (whatever it is, I want some). I have the food thing, and I did drink a bit in my day. But honestly, I think writing is closer to temporary insanity. At least, it is for me.

Take last weekend, for example, when I abruptly wrapped up Spellbinder in a bizarre 18-hour binge of wordplay. I was way, way deep in San Sebastian most of that time (my fake Latin American country, named after my late cat and in homage to Hemingway; it's standing in for El Salvador) but I do recollect a few things. Like sitting at the keyboard and thinking, "I'm thirsty," then about two hours later noticing that I was still thirsty because (wait for it) when I noticed the first time that I was thirsty, it flat out didn't occur to me to frick'n get up and get a bottle of water. Another time I remember Joan asked me a question and I answered with "I don't know, I'm not really here." Joan, by the way, frequently sees me glaze over and asks me "Where did you go?" I guess assuming that I'm visiting the Pure Land or some alternate reality; usually I'm thinking about something much more mundane like shopping lists or how not to trim the cat's nails next time. Even when I'm not putting in marathon weekends, though, I'm often up too late, spend too much time thinking about writing when I should be Mindful Of The Present Moment (ie, driving), and calling up friends in the middle of dinner parties to ask if you can drink heroin (ask Gaby about this, she thought it was pretty hilarious).

So, like, is this healthy? Is this halfway normal? Do other writers do stuff like this or am I unique? And if it's not akin to abusing a substance, why does it feel like (as most brilliant stated by Rod "The Bod" Stewart) "I got lightning in my veins, and the rhythm of my heart is beating like a drum"?

I guess it's better than heroin. It is legal, after all.

Incidentally, thanks, Joan, for putting up with me. Again. Still.