Take a look outside, I swear the truth is really told

I love Curtis Mayfield's "Think" so much. So much. I had dinner at unscrambled's house and she was playing from a list with lots of Curtis Mayfield and Bobby Womack and the Stylistics and I came home and immediately went on a frenzy of uploading CDs, downloading new songs, creating a smart playlist. One of my favorite 'standards' (in the sense of a song that has been recorded by a million people) is "A Change is Gonna Come", and I think Sam Cooke's is probably my favorite, but yesterday I listened to Baby Huey and the Babysitter's NINE minute version that includes a monologue near the end. Brilliant.

A lot of this music matches my romantic/sexual mood in general, of wanting to slow dance, and just, I don't know. I certainly don't want it to be all intense gooey gazes and 'lovemaking' and whipped cream, that's not what I mean at all. More that I just want it to be....easy. As in, easing into it. Slow. Chill. Simple. Easy. Oh god, Marvin Gaye's "After the Dance" just came on. Mmmmm. Yeah. Ahem. Where was I?

Life is much better without a headache. Life is much better for me right now on antidepressants. Its not all fixed, and I still have to remind myself of it, but for the most part, I feel like, wow, there's myself again. And I feel really really lucky that this supplement works for me, and I know its about a combination of things, its not just swallowing pills (sam-e and vitamin b complex and fish oil) everyday, its about a hundred other things, like moving and using my body, paying attention to what and when I eat, talking to friends and my partner about things in my head, going to therapy, etc. but also, there is something to swallowing that pill, and as someone who relies on self-injecting testosterone into my leg every couple weeks, I'm maybe okay with supplementing my body with something that makes me be the self I want to be. Also I feel lucky that I don't feel deadened or numbed out. I still feel sad, about something specific that happens in my day, or about the general feeling of fall and winter and dying away and changing and going dormant. I don't need to spend the winter hyper and electrified and trying to chase that buzz of summer. I'm okay with some hibernation. I'm not okay with paralysis. And I feel like I can finetune the difference better right now.

I started this new novel back in April. I have about 33,000 words so far. Its hard to know exactly how much further to go -- I'm definitely halfway, probably a little further, based on the outline I've been working on. But I'm setting more concrete goals to get a lot of it out by the end of November. Then I'll spend December rearranging the out-of-sequence mess and filling in gaps and throwing out inconsistent parts. And then I'll have a draft done to send out to people on New Year's. That is the larger goal. And the short-term goal is write 5,000 words per week, starting now, going until Thanksgiving. I have 800 so far this week. National novel writing month starts early for me this year.

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Right after I posted about everything being kittens and rainbows, I had a near meltdown, drop-off, frazzled afternoon. Of course. The only time I didn't felt crappy is actually during the 45 minutes of rehearsal with foxycoxy. A combination of a focused task, moving around and getting sweaty, I think. Once I was sitting on the bus again and left to my own devices, it quickly washed over me again and hasn't really let up. Now I'm at work, faking it, with my sweater zipped up to the top so I can fit half my face in it. Kinda like broqued here: Its almost as soothing as the hoodie pulled over my head.

It will pass. Deep breaths and all that. Taking pills is not a perfect cure, and I know that, I don't expect it, but still, sometimes the low feels worse when you're out of the habit. Keep at it, raymond.

ETA: vfc called me about 2 seconds after I posted this and left a hilarious story on my voicemail. I like when the universe has benevolent timing. Also, I was just looking at that photo again and realized that jacket is perhaps hanging in our coat closet because B loaned it to DYA awhile back. I came across it last week, looking for my coat, and I thought "who did one of us sleep with that left this here?!?!? oh. never mind."

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So, I'm watching the end of the documentary on Howard Zinn "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train" and there's a scene of the first big anti-Iraq War rally four years ago, and I'm like, hmm, that looks like the Chicago skyline. And then they cut to footage of people in the march....and there's louche! In her stripey skullcap with facepaint and a whistle. So I rewind and pause it...and there's Moos on the right! louche, did you know you were in this movie??

Hilarious.