[Imported from "LewyLife"] The sweet taste of hypomania!

So "Lewy's Life" pretty much equates to a running up date on my health now!:

Remember the diary free thing? Well i started a follow up of wheat free (just in case my negative blood test for Coeliac the other month wasn't up to scratch) which lasted til after breakfast when i nearly fell asleep (and I'd only had bacon, scrambled egg, mushroom and baked beans!).

With exams coming up (now mid way, and not doing at all bad considering), and after a whole bank holiday weekend of sleeping midnight til 10am but being a zombie, incapable of doing anything (even procrastinating), I decided to drop my prescribed morning and night 

pills just to shake things up!

I became aware of some supplements that really seemed to revitalise (at least for a time), "Happy Days: 5-HTP", so i thought I'd give them a try while I was off the tricyclic. It likely has SSRI action, which is apparently a no-no in conjunction with these.

[Image missing. Added screenshot from diary at the time in place.]

They're a night time thing, right, cos the active ingredient is the pre-cursor for Serotonin, which is then converted to Melatonin by the pineal gland when low light levels on the retina trigger the SCN to initiate a neural chain of event (gotta love how this is also revision for my neuroscience module!).

So i get a little sleep off them, as one might hope, don't particularly notice much direct improvement in getting to sleep, or much else. But over the next few days things pick up in general, and come 2am, the morning of my second exam my brain's starts banging out so many interesting idea i have to grab a pen and pad (for the second night in a row). However, after my 4 hour exam (which would have gone even better if i'd only had an extra, extra 45 minutes), the inspiration just kept coming!; i spent most of the rest of the time, until 1am, filling 10 A4 sides with idea spider diagrams, designs and research! only just managing to drag myself away for my doctor's appointment, hockey, uncharacteristically enthusiastic and incessant conversation + a quick shower, but not dinner....

Anyhow, one upshot of my, near transendant, eye opening experience and the precipitated research and synergy of ideas is knowing that:

• I've had Dysthymia for at least 7 years (just a succinct way of saying what ppl who know me already know).
• My dyslexia is more specifically Sluggish Cognitive Tempo (which again fits so well given that I've been quite literally absentmindedly wondering about my ADHD, but not so much seeing the H).
• 5-HTP (and presumably the increase in distributed Serotonin levels that it brings) fixed me!...for a few days at least. In fact it appears to have brought on 24 hours of hypomania; in this case a slightly more vivid form of the inspiration that occasionally graces me once in a blue moon.
• This may suggest that i'm also classifiable in the range of (the milder) bipolar type II, with a rating of perhaps 30/100 on the scale used in Stephen Fry's docu first part.
• I've had a very helpful little booklet, for some years, that my Mother (i believe) photocopied out of a book for me. It highly recommends 5-HTP to get sleep and well being back on track, along with a shortlist of important vitamins and trace elements that might be supplemented. So i tracked some of those down too while at the chemist, ending up with Magnesium-OK, as they just happen to have most of the important things in there (and no female specific hormones that i can see!).

Either the revitalising effects of 5-HTP wore off very fast, or the other supplements gave a helping hand, because i had a classic, rubbish day, straight after breakfast, today! Bit of a coincidence being the morning after taking the Magnesium-OK for the first time. Hoping it's transitory. I think i did need to try something more new, because the 5-HTP alone haven exactly enable much sleeping, or dreaming that i know of. And i'd rather not totally loose my mind, even in a fit of inspiration!

[Imported from "LewyLife"] The old and the new

My shiny, new copy of “Supreme Commander” came in the post this morning: on the day of it’s release. Purchased for £7 less than it was listed on Amazon (despite a sponsored Google search results purporting it at £5 less that it *actually* was! Mmm… subtle fraudulence). And I’m all excited cos it’s the *real* sequel to Total Annihilation (my favourite game of all time)….

BUT MY COMPUTER WON’T PLAY IT! (if the 1Gb demo I downloaded the other day after making my pre-order is anything to go by, which it almost certainly is) My computer meets the Recommended specs on the nose (give or take some ambiguity about Vertex/Pixel shader jargon). To my shock I realised my computer is over 900 days old (2 na half years) and so may genuinely be too decrepit for this demanding title (TA itself totally killed computers of the time too so I remember, 10 years ago). But I’ve only just finished sorting out this computer into a nice silent configuration, resplendent with heat sinks, I can barely bring myself to contemplate the well practiced new graphics card, motherboard, processor, RAM procedure.

This one time I curse Moore’s Law! If only I could sell one of my kidneys to splash out on a mini heap of new hardware for the odd game of blow up the red guy.

Oh, btw, since my last post I totally gave up giving up dairy products after 5 days (no benefits there), and I didn’t bother blowing £250 on a food allergy test as conventional medical advice firmly states there is no know link to that and tiredness. Plus the lovely york test lady phoned to inform me (predictably) that my indicator test showed some food groups could be troubling me, so would I be proceeding to upgrade to the full screen to find out exactly what might be wrong?...”I’ll think about it.” I hate sales pitches.

I did get to see the fabled Neurologist in oxford though, who kindly prescribed me something to get me off to sleep at a sensible time each night, and if that alone didn’t pan out (which it hasn’t really) I get some Modafinil, the drug I put on my to do list a year and a half ago…

Time is change. Sometimes it seems far too slow. Others: nonsensically rapid. Fingers crossed that the uppers and downers get me sorted enough that I get my neural nets coursework in only a week late, and the rest of my life is a dreamy success!

[Imported from "LewyLife"] Blues and Space Jazz

So the cow milk related product embargo lead nowhere and I blatantly couldn't be arsed avoiding wheat! I have sent off for a £20 finger prick type testing kit, which should arrive just in time for me not to be in the country…

:heavy sigh of depression:…I’ve been back at my home in Rugby since Sunday night and since a couple of days before that I’ve been slowly spiralling. Don’t think it’s Christmas shopping blues. Surely it can’t just be seasonal dysfunction. Is the prospect of being back in my registered address of 23 years that bad?! I mean, summer here was a write off, and the Easter before it is, to me, synonymous with lethargy, but it’s not a bad place:

Free food cooked for me, old mates to see 1-2 times a week, drums (which I’m yet to be in the mood to play so far)…maybe the association of mental blocks on work, in my top floor domain, accumulated over the years, is standing in my way?

I haven’t been doing either coursework assignment (any if you include CMS too), but I *have* been playing with this stupid applet (see pic: right) incessantly since Alex sent me the link, damn him! It’s got the whole causality chain thing going for it, like domino toppling of my childhood or that Honda ad. I’m a Rube Goldberg machine addict!

Also, been watching Cowboy Bebop. It’s comes in 20 minute episodes (like scrubs, which makes it dangerously Moorish) is jazzy and eclectic soundtrack fits neatly with the usual, fast paced, stylistic animation, no wonder it was a hit show. While, generally not gory or explicit, it’s definitively no kid’s show, the dark side of this fictional universe is ever present, with likeable characters killed off just when you were thinking an episode might get cheesily happy.

Care seems to be taken making Faye Valentine not very likeable as a main ‘good guy’ character, which is refreshing. So far the physics is somewhat malleable, but then this more a space western, that a serious anime like Ghost in the Shell (Stand Alone Complex). I liked the Transformers the Movie reference in the 3rd episode: “reversing polarity” of the missiles, nice touch, doubt many ppl were sad enough to notice that one


[Damn! Now I’m watching crazy Japanese Rube Goldberg machines on YouTube!]

[Imported from "LewyLife"] This week I shall mostly be avoiding dairy!:

In a bid to not feel like shit half the time, I'm looking to find out if i have an allergy to something which has been making me tired and fuzzy headed for the last several years. I'm starting with the components of a bowl cereal: Weetabix, Crunchy Nut and Milk (i.e.wheat, corn, dairy and various others), since I had a total energy crash the other day after breakfast, falling asleep for 3 hours when i'd already had at least 10 that night.

[Imported from "LewyLife"] A 3rd blog for the personal and mundane:

Hey, so I've been feeling particularly tired and rubbish of late, but never mind. I've still been able to finish reading Accelerando (by Charles Stross - basically a dramatization of "The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil) and check out some new software/services:

Since previously trusty Firefox went to pieces on my 64bit computer for no apparent reason, I've been needing an alternative. Eventually i got around to trying Opera (which I'm using right now). It has tabbed browsing and some useful features Firefox doesn't have, so I recommend it.

This groovy picture by Eboy inspired me to check out a few other things:

Last.fm - a custom internet radio player, equivalent to Pandora, arguably better.

Well, err, actually that's all the new stuff I'll be using from there for a bit, but i did also just get on Facebook which had been coming for a while. Well… gotta try and stay in touch with the youth, you know, even if i am just an old fart at heart!

2023-11-29 Addendum: I've imported the few posts from my old LewyLife blog to this less defunct blog, and deleted that to tidy up. Images missing that were presumably embedded via URL links only.