Pre-poetry micro-challenge: Day 10 - 2 for the price of one

Yesterday was crunchy, and I didn't get to pre-poetry writing, so this morning, I've done two to make up for it. Still experimenting with the best times for stuff with school starting. I'm not quite in a routine yet, but I figure I can still keep up with my habit-building goodness.  

Pre-poetry micro-challenge: Day 6 -- Tiny altars

Some day, I would love to be able to make something like this. 

Encaustic, book altering and personal shrines. Three of my favourite art forms coming together. I love the nature of these perfect miniature monuments to the self and spirit, tiny meditation altars to focus the love you hold for yourself or another. The form lends mystery, imparted partly by the hidden content behind the cover -- a little box of smouldering potential -- partly by the littleness and intensely personal nature. And the mottled wax, at once ethereal, ephemeral, archival.

Pre-poetry micro-challenge: Day 4 -- steampunk

Getting more structured with each post. I like it and I don't. Part of me wants to stay elemental with just word association, but part of me wants sentences, poetry over prose, etc. Interesting to see these predilections coming out of their own accord. It's amazing what we can learn when we stick to the plan.

Pre-poetry micro-challenge Day 3 -- Ideal experimentation

Which one is the right one? Only one way to find out.

experimentation at its best, I long to use my kitchen as a test kitchen, but the space, the increase in the amount of food we'd have to buy, the increase in the amount of food we'd EAT! 4 cakes, which is best? so objective, I'm left wondering. what makes things good is so defined by personal taste. I don't know how to describe what I like in a cake. I'll have to taste them all. Bake them all. So tempting. Record-keeping is my nemesis. How to do it, when, in what form, where, for what purpose?

Project CIMOS: Week 1, Day 2 journal

Jan 4, 2012

Ack. Writing the date feels a little like a betrayal of myself. Where is the time going!? Anyway. Today felt like a good start on the path to cultivating a habit of non-judgment.

Caribana week ahead: getting ready (to wuk)

This week will be an exciting one, with the Caribana parade this Saturday, partying the Sunday after, and all the preparation that's going into it all.

Today was the last class of Socasize Bootcamp, a dance aerobic class a couple of us took to get ready for the road, both by getting familiar with this year's music and moves, and also of course by upping our endurance to wine up for some 6 hours straight! I found that two hours of aerobics was really pushing it at first, but I got more used ot it, and the format of the class is perfect. It used the moves I grew up with as well as new ones to build tone and endurance, and the instructor really encourages you to throw it all out there and have fun with the dancing and the music. I totally would do it again, either during the year as a regular one-hour non-boot-camp class, or the bootcamp again if I play Mas in the future. Some of my favourite songs from the class:

• Come to Meh by Iwer George
• Hard Wuk by Machel Montano 
• Advantage by Machel Montano
• Illegal by Machel Montano
• Tornado by Otis 
• Wotless by Kes the Band 

Exercise.... who knew?

So this anti-anxiety, anti-depression medication that I'm taking has been taking me on a minor roller-coaster (think teacups, not days of thunder) of side-effects. At first I had a lot, but only for a few days. Eventually it leveled out so I seemed to only be having trouble with some jaw tension, and vivid yet mundane dreams that sometimes tire me out (which I've had for some time, but have become more frequent since the medication). I figured I could handle that, at least for a few months, as long as I was able to be comfortable most of the time.

However, more recently, a couple of somewhat more disturbing (in both the physical and emotional sense) side-effects have cropped up -- more than usually jittery legs after having lay in the same position for a while, and a weird involuntary movement of my diaphragm that disrupts my regular breathing pattern when I'm drifting toward sleep -- both of which seriously derail my ability to get a good night's sleep. And you know how I feel about sleep. Not only that, but my strange dreams kept me popping in and out of sleep and full of exhausting worry during the sleep I did get. So unfair! This, and not headaches and jaw tension, was enough to make me think about calling my doctor for a change.

I had these side-effects when I first started taking the medication, but since I'd had them less intensely before when not on medication, and since they died off as the initial jitteriness caused by the meds calmed down, I wasn't worried about them. But when they started cropping up again, they were both disruptive and worrisome.

But another cofactor, which may have seemed fairly inconsequential but which I'm now thinking may have an important effect on regulation of the medication's ability to make me jittery, is the fact that around the time I started taking this medication, I also started going to Goodlife and taking BodyFlow or aerobic classes once a week. I noticed that even though I was very jittery at first, the night after BodyFlow or BodyJam, I slept like a baby.

Eventually, the side effects completely died down and I thought nothing more of them, until late July, when I had a few interruptions to my gym schedule, and stayed away for probably about a month. About three weeks in, my jittery legs and diaphragm were back and I was noticing headaches and jaw tension more. I wondered if there was any coincidence, since even through the screen of my habitual reluctance to drag myself out to the gym, I felt a longing to go there. A few nights, I tried doing a sun-worship yoga flow once through on each side of my body before going to bed, and things improved measurably. I was able to get through a night's sleep. Perhaps I was really on to something.

I mentioned to my therapist the theory that getting back to the gym might calm my jitters. She didn't endorse it one way or the other (although she's all for exercise as a good way to combat depression and anxiety), but she suggested that I test it by using the following week (this past one) as a trial period, to step up (reinstate, really) my exercise routine and see if it helped.

So I went and did a quickie workout (a 15 minute run, a few weight machines, a couple stretches) on Friday the 27th, and that -- probably in combination with lots of walking in shopping malls and beaches during the following weekend -- took me through to about September 1 with no sleep issues. Around the night of the 2nd, I got a few jitters and a few breathing hiccups, but nothing that kept me from sleeping the night. Yesterday I went again and went all the way through Goodlife's "FitFix" gym, and last night I slept soundly, without even any weird dreams to tire me out.

My theory is that maybe this medication really elevates whatever it is that makes me hyper and full of energy, and that I need to siphon some of that off every once in a while so that it doesn't prevent me from having downtime. So exercise is the key for me to get a good night's sleep. How's that for motivation to go to the gym?

I dreamed a dream (or: A very un-portent state)

Here's why I don't believe that dreams are portents sent from some outside entity to forewarn of present or future events.

The content, intensity and memorability of my dreams is heavily based on what I've been thinking about over the past month, whether or not I'm on medication, and what I've eaten that evening. In other words, my dreams are made up of my inner life. To me, this signals something that can have direct bearing only on that inner life, and can go further only via my choices.

Last night, I dreamed (among other dreams) that G, K and I went on a jaunt to Paris, secure in the knowledge of having rented an apartment from somebody that G knew. When we arrived, we realized none of us had thought to google the place to find out where it was. All we knew, collectively, was that it was in Paris, and that it had an address on rue Ste-Bernadette. No problem right? We'll just poke around town til we find it? D'oh.

So we started asking people -- Ou se trouve rue Ste-Bernadette? -- Euhhh... je ne connais pas rue Ste-Bernadette... So we started looking in the phone books... no such of a road. The apartment could not have existed, we had been had!

(Incidentally, I have since googled it, and found that indeed, there is no rue Ste-Bernadette in Paris, though there is a place Ste-Bernadette in a nearby suburb. So there you go.)

As I drifted toward wakefulness, I was still pondering the possibilities for moving forward -- perhaps I could get a job tutoring English to teens wanting to go abroad, or French to ex-pats and tourists, to support my sisters and I while we tried to eke out food and lodgings and entertainment during our stay...

I found the dream slightly disconcerting in its verisimilitude (colour, reality of character, intensity of real life, plausibility), but all of the elements can easily be traced back to things I know and frequently think about. I have no worry that I will soon embark on a botched overseas trip. If you know me, you know I wouldn't budge without personally knowing exactly where I was going first.

I've never believed in dreams as a hard and fast set of symbols that are universal to everyone, or even to a given cultural set, and I've never really understood the thinking that says that they are. I think the dreams of an individual have unique representations for the individual and any commonality can only be owing to the experiences and imagery that any set of people may happen to have in common. No matter what else is true, I believe that dreams are built from whatever is within the person, and if a given person does not have a deep-seated idea of, for example, a voyage as something that represents an inheritance (or, in my case, a disastrous voyage that represents incompetence and false loves), then I don't believe that such a dream can possibly represent those things for that person.

This is not to say that I don't believe dreams can have meaning, or that they can sometimes reveal shocking things to people. I think dreams can be a medium to reveal truths that may be within a person's sensory grasp but outside of their ability to effectively process. That is to say, I think dreams are exclusively a way for the self to communicate with the self, but that information gleaned from unconventional information (i.e. ESP) could find its way to a person's understanding through dreams. You might have a momentary bad feeling when all seems well, but through a dream realize that something bad is happening so far away that you could not have perceived it through the regular sensory channels.

However, I don't believe that this particular dream -- or last night's other dream where my aunts were secretly hosting a family event that would effectively sabotage another aunt's annual family gathering unbeknownst to her -- has any sort of implication beyond the idle musings and overfed turmoil of my anxious and creative brain. Though maybe I will email my aunts, just to make sure.