You know, I'm not even going to go back and do a spellcheck on yesterday's blog, or proofread it anally as I usually do. I think I should generally stop making every blog into an elaborate writing project, and just blog like a normal person; blogging with such intensity is sort of wearing on me.
I thought I should detail the weird woman who is staying in MY apartment. She invited herself over to mark and wei's house, and told them she was going to impose herself for six days. Mark told her that she could stay in hannah's apartment, because the weird woman was a horrible, horrible houseguest. She is like a female version of mark and peter's father, who isn't perhaps the most socially well-adjusted man in the world.
For one thing, her hair is set into two long, unbraided pony-tails protruding out the sides of her head. Her mannerisms, speech and face are creepily similar to mark and peter's father. And, most importantly, she absolutely will not shut up, ever. When she's in the company of others, a continuous stream of crap flows out of her mouth. Most of the time, the stream consists of telling people (in this case, mark and wei) that they are doing everything absolutely wrong, and that all of their eating, cooking and other household mistakes (such as using a gas stove) are going to cause cancer.
So, apparently it was just nonstop this way: the lecturing and imposition in the form of constant babbling. Mark likened her to a snake-oil salesman, and I see his point. Manipulation and self-interested sneakiness disguised as affection is one of her specialties. Apparently, that whole side of the family is that way.
Mark and wei banished her to concord. Mark and I drove her there (it's about an hour's drive), and I got a taste of her medicine. Not only did she not shut up for even a few seconds, but it was more of the same: talking about her dietary knowledge, as well as some name-dropping and self-aggrandizing (she was jerry garcia's personal assistant, teenage boys were chasing her when she was skiing, etc).
It was actually sort of entertaining for an hour, but I can see how any much longer than that would have been intolerable. Mark and wei were ready to throw her out into the street, which they sort of did. Anyway, she's probably still there, but can't be reached. This is a matter of some concern, because she has my keys to the apartment. This is not such a big deal, since mark has a spare key, but maya (weird lady's name) also has the one and only mail key. So, if the keys are not retrieved, hannah will have to get her mailbox lock drilled.
It's nice being able to gossip shamelessly about someone in my blog, with the knowledge that they will never, ever, in a thousand years, read my web-tabloid. And even if the person in question (maya) does, by some bizzare twist of fate, I will never see her again, as long as I live.
I don't know how much longer I can stay at mark and wei's place before they start getting sick of me. But, the situation is unavoidable, since maya has taken over my place in concord. And, even though I might be annoying and burdensome to have hanging around on the internet or reading all day, it's preferable to having some czech 'heidi of the swiss alps' health food freak telling wei how to fry dumplings.
I got a job! It's official now -- I work in an art supply store in berkeley. I start on Tuesday, from 10:30am - 9pm. It's rotten the way these retailers have engineered an eight hour workday to mean 'eight hours of work plus a half-hour, unpaid lunch break'. But, I shouldn't speak ill of my new employer. The commute to and from work is going to be sort of hellish no matter how I look at it, but it's a temporary thing until I 1) get my car 2) get my bike 3) move to a home closer to my workplace, or 4) get sick of the bay area and leave it. The problem with the bay area is thus: it's too expensive.
It's simply not possible for a retail-peon, earning $8.50/h, to live here. I'll be living with hannah and paying her $150 a month, but I'm not sure how long that'll work out. At any rate, this arrangement isn't permanent -- I can't see myself living in the bay area for the rest of my life. It's too big, crowded, snobby, and rich. Also, the way it tries to reconcile 'hippy' with 'yuppy' is sort of a national joke.
I think I'd like to live in a small town in canada. Of course, I'd get lonely, which points to the main (only, really) reason I'm here, in concord/berkeley: because I have a support network here.
The challenge is going to whether or not I can stand to look at this blog on the web, and then refrain from making changes in it. I will, however, do a spell check, just so I don't sound like too much of an idiot.
I feel bad that it's mothers' day, and I won't be around in g-burg. I didn't even send a card, because I am evil and don't know where to buy a card, and am getting shuttled all over the place via BART and other people's cars. Some freak czech woman is staying in my (hannah's) apartment until some unspecified date, so I was bumped out and moved to berkeley until she leaves. I probably got a job at an art supply store, so I'll contact them tomorrow and see what the scoop is. But the store is really far away from any BART station -- about 1.5 miles from downtown berkeley and north berkeley. So, I don't know how I'm going to do that. Actually, it might even be less painful traveling from concord. At least I get a nice, peaceful BART ride that way, and a flat bike ride, both from hannah's place to the concord BART, and then from the berkeley BART to the art store. BART. BART. BART. BART.
Anyway, there's this weird woman in hannah's place, and no one knows when she's leaving, and my guitar and equipment are there, and she has my key, and no one knows when she's going to get the key back, and no one knows when I start work, if I start work, where I'll be when I start work, or how I'll get from where I am to work when I start work. And I'm here in berkeley, sitting in mark 'n' wei's house while they are at a (no shit) ballet. So, I fried up some dumplings, burning them badly and filling the house with stench. Then, I ate mark's ice cream and drank his beer. So, there it is.
The woman who's currently invading my apartment was shipped there last night. She saw the mess I left, and said that I was an inhuman pig, in czech, to Peter when he called her today. He was trying to reach me.
So generally, things are complicated and weird, but reasonably ok, because I'm on my medication. NO SPELL CHECK FOR YOU.
What follows is an analysis of my brain injury. I'd caution the reader away from necessarily applying these analyses to other sufferers, because the effects of a brain injury vary so widely. Every case is different -- the only thing that is similar across the board is that there have been changes in neurological structure and function. These changes are most easily interpreted as deficits, especially when it comes to functioning productively in a society.
As you read, keep in mind the following sub-categories of dysfunction:
1) visual processing
2) mood disregulation
3) congnition
4) memory
5) seizure activity
Looking at brain damage as a disability raises the question, 'why is the brain damaged person considered disabled, as opposed to someone with a 'naturally' poorly-functining brain?' brain damage is a cause of neurological problems that make it difficult to hold down a job, so the sufferer might consequently be given some disability money. Now, consider someone who is naturally 'cognitively deficient' (we avoid 'stupid', at least until we get tired of typing 'cognitively-deficient'), and has the same problems holding down a job because of his or her deficits. Why not give that person disability money as well? Both brain damage and cognitive dysfunction are causal agents of productivity-sapping behavior; both the brain-damaged person and the cognitively-deficient person are subject to some organic barriers and limitations in their ability to use their brains.
Society has chosen to make a distinction. A brain injury is an external, circumstantial change, brought about by an event outside of a person's natural development. The brain-damaged person suffers from difficulty in acclimating to a new set of limitations, while a naturally cognitively-deficient person has dealt with limitations his or her entire life, and has thus been developing 'coping strategies' (or simply living according to ability) since birth. What differentiates a brain injury from natural cognitive-deficiency is that a brain-injury brings on a sudden change; if a person were suddenly made stupid after 22 years of being smart, s/he might never be able to make the adjustment, despite spending the remainder of a lifetime developing new ways to cope.
Although natural stupidity and brain damage are events beyond the sufferer's control or free choice (if you believe in that sort of thing), stupidity is seen as less deserving of society's aid in overcoming its associated life-difficulties, because it has always been with the sufferer; it doesn't represent a change in functioning.
Someone who is extremely stupid (ie, with mental retardation) is given society's help. But a mildly stupid person isn't given help. My injury didn't make me mentally retarded, but only made me stupider than I was. But I'm not stupider in every way -- I can still write pretty well, play the guitar, do fairly advanced math and logic, and paint. I just can't find a particular book in a stack of them even though it is clearly visible to most others, learn very quickly, remember names, or refrain from putting numerous holes in the drywall or threatening to kill strangers in traffic.
There might exist someone who has a bad memory, has mood swings, can't find their keys even though they're right in front of their nose, and is easily confused. Someone might even be prone to seizure activity and never know it -- temporal lobe epilepsy (which produces similar seizures to those caused by temporal lobe-damage) is challenging to diagnose, and its impact on day-to-day life often isn't debilitating. A brain damaged person might be indistinguishable from this sort of epileptic.
If no one knew me before the injury, and I weren't able to evaluate the changes myself, I'm not sure any 'disabilities' would be obvious. But because my brain works differently than the way it used to (but still perhaps better than a lot of people's undamaged brains, even in the specific areas of my damage), I'm seen as disabled.
My brain damage exacerbates mood disregulation; I am subject to temper outbursts as well as bouts of sadness and hopelessness. Also, there's a manic quality to my depression that wasn't there before my injury. This mania combines with and is somewhat indistinguishable from racing thoughts, which are a consequence of seizure-activity.
My visual processing is poor. This specifically manifests in tunnel vision and poor eye-tracking. Reading is problematic, as is finding, for instance, a particular book on a shelf, because I can't move my eyes easily from book-to-book, nor do I see surrounding books when I'm looking at a specific one. If I manage to find a book a bit off of my direct point of focus, then the knowledge that the book is there somehow causes it to be visible, although the focus of my gaze hasn't changed. Simply the awareness of an object brings it into perception, which illustrates that mine isn't a difficulty with vision, but rather in the way vision is processed in the brain.
My brain damage causes problems with cognition, amounting to odd logic, problems with fluid reasoning, slow thinking, and difficulty learning. 'fluid reasoning' deserves some elaboration; briefly, it amounts to difficulty solving problems, especially ones that are clearly composed of several (perhaps not necessarily) interrelated, interdependent elements.
My issues with 'fluid reasoning' are related to my racing thoughts and inability to concentrate (two other symptoms/consequences). This demonstrates the difficulty in distinguishing one injury-related problem from the next -- breaking the issue up into categories proves largely impossible for me, because I'm not able to simplify and see things as discreet. Here we have a self-referential example of fluid reasoning-difficulty.
Of course, this is actually true, in a philosophical sense; all of reality is interconnected, and every one 'object' affects all other 'objects'. However, my application of this theoretical, philosophical and spiritual view of the nature of reality to my own very real 'reality' is debilitating; I'm not able to isolate and solve individual problems because they themselves are too complicated and interrelated to solve. Trying to approach a solution to one sub-problem yields a set of new problems and/or is illustrative of the insolvability of other problems. Even in trying to explain this, I'm feeling a bit of the problem itself, so I think I should stop with this now. My tangental writing a good metaphor for and illustration of the problem. The philosophical irony continues without respite.
To me, every problem is overly complex. That is not to say that these complexities aren't there anyway, but that I'm unable to reduce them to one or a few single issues. Instead of focusing on an overall solution, I concentrate on individual details and component problems, and trying to solve these one-at-a-time results in an ongoing loop of problems, as the solution of one proves unfeasable because of the next in my chain of thought, the one after which is unsolvable because of problems with the next and/or previous in the chain, and so on.
When mood disregulation is combined with confused thinking and fluid reasoning difficulties, the result is hopelessness and feelings of suicide, because life is just too hard. When my mood is fine, then the logic problems manifest themselves more clearly and discreetly -- I'll just keep moving back and forth, going in circles around the same network of interlocking problems and solutions. I'm confused, puzzled, and caught in a loop, but it doesn't upset me, particularly. But I could theoretically keep going forever if time allowed.
I make things too complicated, and think tangentially. I'm not able to restrict problem solving to a few problems, and isolate these from others.
Ill try to give an example: imagine a set of outer windows, one of which is missing a storm window. The idea is to get the place where a storm window is missing into a room where the outer window is the least damaged and has the best seal on its own. However, some of the storm windows and outer windows are differently-sized, and all won't match up. So, confronted with this, I might race back and forth from room to room, exchanging storm windows from this outer window to that, until I'm forced to stop. This actually happened; my mother saw that as the first indication that I am actually insane.
Let's do another example: imagine someone carrying two objects, who needs to pick another object off of a table. Let's say that s/he's carrying a wallet and a set of keys, and s/he needs to get his or her day planner. Of course, the example person is me, and this has happened several times. Do I put down the wallet, and get the day planner? Do I put down the keys, and get the day planner? When I get the day planner, I'll have to put down the wallet or keys, because I have only two hands. I've learned to recognize these episodes, and when they occur, my consistent solution is to immediately drop everything on the floor. From there, I can usually work through it.
I experience injury-related seizure activity. This manifests in sleep disturbances, temper outbursts, intrusive thoughts, and racing, manic thoughts. My neurons fire too much, and fire out of control.
My brain injury brought about significant memory problems -- my short term memory has been clearly and noticeably damaged. While I didn't have a terrific memory before my injury, it has gotten much, much worse. Sometimes something will just slip away in seconds. For instance, if I have an idea for an essay, I need to jump onto the computer immediately, or else I know it'll be lost forever. Even this sometimes doesn't work, and I'll forget the idea as I type the first few words. A poor short-term memory results in an odd writing style: often, I'll start new paragraphs while in the middle of typing another, because my mind flows far quicker than my fingers can type, and I don't want to lose this new thought. As a result, it's quite a challenge for me to go back over a piece of my writing and re-paragraph it in a way that makes some modicum of sense.
My brain damage causes mood disregulation. Again, this problem existed before the injury, but was made much worse. Mood disregulation is partly relieved by medication, as is seizure-activity. Mood problems and seizure problems interconnect, most notably during temper outbursts. So, lamictal, or another anticonvulsant with antidepressant properties, is a good choices for medication. While it does nothing to improve memory, visual processing, or confused thinking, it certainly helps seizure-activity and mood-disregulation, as it was designed to do. Just to make things more complicated for your reading pleasure, seizure activity crosses over into confused thinking -- logically unsound thoughts are worsened when those thoughts come too fast to properly handle.
All of these issues existed to a lesser degree before my injury, but have been exacerbated. This is problematic, because it might be argued that there wasn't any damage, with supporting evidence, by less-educated people. And certainly there is a psychological component -- since I know that I have brain damage (the shear-injuries to my brain tissue are visible in a CAT scan), I'm likely to think harder and longer about the problems than I possibly should, my deficits might have elements of self-fulfilling prophecies. But, again, this approach can be thought of as more confused thinking. Thinking about the brain, especially when that brain and those thought processes aren't working quite right, necessarily results in a lot of strange-loops, paradoxes, and ironies.
People are sometimes tempted to remark 'there's nothing wrong with you! You're exactly the same as you ever were!' this is largely the 'someone who doesn't look disabled can't be disabled' phenomenon. Those who are suspicious of genuine disability know that it's easy to invent things as subjective as 'confused thinking' and 'poor cognition', and even 'memory problems'. 'matt, you've always had a bad memory', someone might say. This adds to the brain injury-sufferer's central conundrum, which has been documented and observed in many sufferers, and was even the subject of a television commercial for a head injury rehabilitation service. That central conundrum is 'am I the same as I ever was, or am a different person? I find that I can't remember who I was before the accident'. In fact, things are the same, essentially, but they've been altered or exaggerated.
Amateur diagnosticians would be well-advised to stop making assumptions, and realize that there are trained professionals, so to speak, who understand the mechanics and neuropsychological subtleties of a brain injury far better those who make those assumptions ever can or will.
On the bright side, I think my brain has gradually recovered some over the years, this, too, is a strange and ambiguous concept. Is my 'recovery' a matter of neurons carving out new pathways, or merely my getting used to the effects of the damage? Or, might these two things be the same thing? We know that new neural pathways are formed when new behavior is learned.
Am I different than I was before? Yes. Did some of these conditions exist before? Yes, but they weren't as severe. Do these conditions present a problem? Yes, because I didn't have them for 22 years, and then they came about. Furthermore, these cahnges in functioning result in consequences that make it, as experience has dictated, impossible to find sustainable employment.
Even though these interconnected problems are frustrating to consider (thinking about my damaged brain with my damaged brain), I'll finally attempt to summarize my rambling analysis of the subject, and break my problems into a few inherently imperfect, incomplete, interrelated, and ambiguously-defined categories, which I mentioned at the start:
1) visual processing -- tunnel-vision. Problems with eye-tracking; I skip around on a page a lot.
2) mood disregulation -- depression, rage, sadness, mania.
3) cognition -- difficulties with working interrelated problems, and defining several problems into a greater whole with a single solution. Odd logic; drawing strange an inappropriate conclusions. Slow learning, and loss of learned material if it's not continually practiced.
4) memory -- short-term memory is notably damaged.
5) seizure activity -- temper outburst, racing thoughts, intrusive thoughts, inability to concentrate, sleep disturbances.
Again, these issues all arguably existed, in some capacity, before my injury, some more than others. Listed in order of clearest correlation with my injury:
Memory, visual problems, cognition, seizure activity, mood disregulation.
Seizure activity is especially problematic and difficult to assess, since I was previously diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy (which causes seizures similar to those caused by a brain injury). To further complicate matters, my damage was restricted to the right temporal lobe. The consensus is that seizure activity existed before, but the brain injury exacerbated it. However, the sleep disturbances, which are considered largely a result of seizure activity, weren't a problem, pre-trauma.
I was medicated for mood disregulation before my brain injury, but I'm not sure in retrospect how necessary that was; my depression then perhaps had a more situational component. Now, the disregulation amounts to periods of mania and depression, so it's more clearly an organic problem than before.
All in all, a good way to summarily look at things is that the brain injury severely exacerbated some pre-existing traits or conditions; a few of my brain's particularities have been exaggerated, with negative consequences.
This piece of writing is philosophical and theoretical in nature. As far as practical treatment for the associated problems, the only things that can be helped are the mood-disregulation and seizure-activity (as is being done with my current medication). All else will have to wait for advances in neurosurgery.
We now bring you back to our regularly-scheduled blog (which is related, of course).
I feel as though I've made a series of poor choices throughout my life. All I need to do is stay alive, and some day things will get better. I'll do what I need to do to be successful. All I need to do is stay alive. Suicide is the only and ultimate failure.
Anything someone does a lot of thinking about will become increasingly complex, interrelated, and unsolvable problem. I've done a great deal of thinking about my brain injury with my injured brain.
I'm lonely here in california, and I'm afraid of wearing out my welcome at mark and wei's house. Also, it's far away, and BARTing over there is getting expensive. Not to mention BARTing anywhere else, ie, to job interviews. I'm going to have one shortly as a guitar teacher, working only one day a week or so. However, this might be enough to provide the $100 a month or so that I need to pay hannah to keep staying at her place.
Right now, I'm having trouble connecting to the internet. Yesterday, I connected on the second try, so my hopes were up. Now, it's doing its usual thing. History teaches us that I'll connect on about the 10th attempt. It's unlikely (i think) that the guitar lesson-person will call me now, after 8pm, so I think I'll basically stay on the internet all night. At any rate, I'll call him in the morning. Ah, another failed connection. This is discouraging. My chat friends are basically the only company I have, aside from johann sebastian bach and herman hesse. HAHA. I should get some kind of pretentiousness-award for that one.
I've actually only been to one official job interview (at a temp agency) -- all of my other activity has consisted of going to berkeley to look around for jobs, getting a phone book at the local library and cold-calling places of interest, filling out an application at an art supply store, and acquiring copies of the oakland/berkeley want-ads (which I've not yet looked at).
One job-hunting activity per day is about my limit; it just drains the energy from me. Last night I slept over at mark 'n' wei's house yet again (which is why I'm starting to get worried that they're getting sick of me). I forgot to bring my medication, which really screwed me up. I couldn't sleep (seizure activity), and felt psychologically and physically awful the earlier part of today (mood disregulation). When I got back to concord, I gulped down some pills and slept for 4 hours in the mid-afternoon.
Every day I consider catching a flight back to gaithersburg. Whenever I'm on mark's fast internet, I always go to jetblue.com, gaze at the flights from oakland to dulles for $85, and fantasize. I felt like I was overlooking an opportunity by not flying out here, but I think maybe I missed an opportunity by flying out here -- I was doing all right at my job in Maryland, which is a pretty rare thing for me. Also, I was learning a trade. I don't know if I'll be able to throw something like that together again. As always, there are advantages and disadvantages to every situation, and it's comparing pros and cons that always gets to me, and targets the very problems with fluid reasoning I discussed above.
The date on this entry is anyone's guess, since I can't connect to my 21kbps internet. Tomorrow I'll look for some more jobs, calling want ads in the 'berkeley daily planet' and 'the oakland bastard' (or something). Oh my god -- I connected! This was after maybe 8 tries. So, at least things are consistent.
Friggin huge blog. Proof-reading painful, awful.
It took, just now, about 10 tries to access the internet. It's almost not worth it. Yesterday I went over to mark 'n' wei's place again, this time trekking around with mark to get gravel and dump it into wei's SUV. Actually using an SUV for practical purposes lent a righteous feeling, but it subsided when I realized that a pickup truck would have been a lot easier and faster than shoveling half a ton of gravel through the hatchback into the finished interior of a $30,000 'sport utility vehicle'. But, I suppose this use was better than driving the kids to soccer practice in an enclosed truck chassis on top of a sedan's wheels and drive-train.
Excuse: if an SUV-purchaser regularly hauls things back and forth, AND has six children (who, of course, are in a pee-wee soccer league), then a 2-seat pickup and a sedan with a small interior would both be impractical, for respective reasons. Also, an SUV is, in some cases, possibly, if one is lucky, going to be cheaper than a truck plus a sedan.
However: hauling gravel, trash and other filthy stuff is going to make the vehicle grimey, most people don't have six kids who all have soccer practice at once, and the SUV is going to eat a tremendous amount of gas and money when one drives it to the grocery store and to work every day. Also, you can get a sedan for $8,000 and a truck for $10,000. Finding an SUV selling for $18,000 might be difficult.
In conclusion: who gives a shit?
I slept at mark's, on the futon and after watching 'pumping iron', which starred the one and only governator at 28 years old, when he had won something like five 'mr. Olympia' competitions.
Here I am again back in concord, where I have my unreliable internet, my guitar and effects, stereo tuned to NPR, and a few books. There's also a bicycle, and the recent unfortunate development of tiny red ants crawling everywhere. When I came back this afternoon, they were sitting on the phone for some reason.
The bike, which I borrowed from (you guessed it) mark and wei, is sitting on my patio, but I don't have a bike lock for it. Also, I don't have a phone book or grid-map of concord, so it's impossible to find a hardware store or bike shop where I might find such a lock. Even if I were to ride out in a blind search for one, I'd still be unable to lock my bike if and when I found such a store. Ha! I find that a fun thing to do when logistical problems like these come up is to treat them like math problems in a textbook, and talk about myself in the third person with a pseudonym. Like so:
1) jim just moved to a new town. His only means of transportation is a bicycle. In order to use the bicycle to ride around and purchase needed items as well as get to the metro, he needs to be able to lock up said bike in front of whatever venue he rides to. Furthermore, he has no map or phone book to find any store. He also doesn't have a bike lock; this is one of the items he needs to get. Jim, of course, can't park an unlocked bike in front of a bike shop or hardware store (if there are indeed any around), a map-selling venue or a phone book-selling venue. Jim has no idea where a phone book, map, or bike lock might be sold. So, jim's goal is to get these three items (phone book, map, and bike lock). In what order should he get them, and how will he go about getting them, considering he has no idea where anything is and had better not leave his bike, unlocked and unattended, outside anywhere?
The internet! Even though it's slow and shitty, jim can find things with yahoo yellow pages, and call places to find out if they have bike locks. Then, he can enter the addresses into mapquest, and draw himself up directions to a bike lock-vendor. Then, to get his lock, he can explain to whoever might not like his wheeling his bike inside with him that he's there to buy a bike lock; this is reasonable. Or, jim can walk to the bike lock-vendor.
Jim is going to go search yahoo yellow pages now.