A long overdue Open Thread for Personal Stuff. (There’s also one for non-personal stuff.)
As always, no trolls or MRAs. Let me know if any show up.
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Open Thread for Personal Stuff, 5/16 Bearcat Edition
We Hunted The MammothBucking the Backlash
Sorry for your loss
I have a weird story, but first I want to offer condolences to Paradoxy for her kitty.
Right after I was discharged from the USAF in 1987, I moved in with my dad. I had been out of the country for the previous year, I didn’t have a job yet and I was re-acquainting myself with American consumerism. As in, running some errands after a trip to the mall.
Leaving the mall on the way to where my truck was parked, I passed another pickup truck, silver, with a kind of metal framework in the bed (like some handymen use for ladders and such) and two large appliance-type boxes in the bed instead of tools. These were washer/dryer/stove sized. I would never have noticed it if I hadn’t had to walk right past it. NBD at this point.
I went to the grocery store after one other stop (don’t remember what that was anymore, but no truck that I could see, anyhow.) Coming out with my groceries, what do I see parked a short way beyond my truck? Looked like the same truck from the mall! There didn’t appear to be anyone in it, though. I told myself it had to be a different truck, right? I was actually convinced of that by the time I got home. After all, the San Fernando Valley is a big place!
After I’d been home for a while, I looked out the living room window and parked across the street and down a ways was that truck. Again! WTF?! And again, no one in or around it. It was still there when I went to bed and gone the next morning.
Whoever was following me either wasn’t trying to hide the fact or was rather inept. But it was only that day. I used to tell people it was the government because I’d had a rather high security clearance, but I really don’t know what the deal was.
What I do know is that there was a lot of interference, pops and clicks and such, on my dad’s phone for months after I moved in with him…
@ Hambeast
I used to have a black car with super tinted windows and the fancy headlights follow me around. It would park at the neighbor’s place and follow me to school. I even started driving my friend to school even though he lived 3 or 4 miles away in the wrong direction because I was afraid of this creepy car following me all the time. I never did figure out who or why.
Necro from page 2,
Yes. Drugs used as anti-depressants can be broken down into at least 5 classes based on the neurotransmitters they interact with. Almost all of the anti-depressants you likely recognize by name come from the same class, SSRI. American doctors almost always try an SSRI before doing anything else, so a large number of drugs were developed to compete in that market. Prozac, Zoloft (aka sertraline), Celexa, Lexapro, Paxil, and Luvox are all SSRIs. SSRIs are used first because their side effects are very rarely dangerous, and because they’re “generalist” drugs. Some anti-depressants are tailored to help people with very specific profiles, but you can prescribe an SSRI to a patient you know very little about and be confident it will probably be at least somewhat helpful.
There are a few anti-depressants with milder sexual effects, and one with reversed effects. Wellbutrin tends to give people more sex drive and more orgasms — sometimes to a problematic degree. Many of Wellbutrin’s side effects are exact opposites of SSRI side effects. A lot of people add Wellbutrin to an SSRI in hopes that the downsides cancel each other out.
In some cases you might be fine with just Wellbutrin, but it really depends on exactly what your problems are. Wellbutrin improves about half the symptoms of depression and makes the other half worse, so it might be perfect or it might be useless.
@Paradoxy
All the hugs, and my deepest condolences.
Wellbutrin reduced my sex drive. Now I’m kind of sad I didn’t have the typical response. 😉
Also I would say it might be detrimental in some cases (like mine), so it’s not really a scale of perfect to useless. However, my doctor was an idiot who prescribed it despite me having a ton of symptoms not related to depression, and it gave me a number of depression-like symptoms while only marginally improving the fatigue she was trying to treat, and while making some symptoms of my actual condition worse. So my case is probably atypical.
Once when I was 15 or 16 I was walking to a lake about a mile from my house to meet a friend for hanging on the beach and swimming. I stopped at a gas station on the way to get something to drink. This maybe 40 year old man in line behind me was giving me serious creeper vibes even though he hadn’t said a thing to me. Well, wouldn’t you know? After I left and he left the gas station, he rolled up next to me and kept trying to talk to me. I ignored him and he finally drove off.
I continued on to the lake with no further incident. We spent a couple hours there and then I walked back home, again with no incident. When I got home, a different friend who lived in my neighborhood came over. We were sitting in my front yard talking and the same man drove slowly past my house. It was so freaky.
It could have been a coincidence, but I had never seen before and never saw him after. So I don’t think he lived in my neighborhood. My house was not on a busy street, so I don’t know why he’d just happen to be driving by hours. Most likely, he looped back around the block in his car, followed me to the lake, watched me while I was doing summery beach stuff in a bikini, and then followed me home.
It was probably the scariest thing that ever happened to me. I guess I should just be happy he didn’t stalk me for longer than a day.
@Kupo,
You’re right; I said “useless” but should have said “destructive.” Your case sounds pretty typical. A lot of people have bad experiences with Wellbutrin, and it’s often because of errors in their diagnosis. I’m very glad that my girlfriend and I are both off of it.
Wellbutrin is super-effective at treating the most common type of depression, which is called “atypical depression” for stupid historical reasons. If depression is (a) actually your problem and (b) your only problem, Wellbutrin is great.
If you have any kind of anxiety disorder — general anxiety, OCD, eating disorders, panic attacks, etc., Wellbutrin can make it worse. If you’re both depressed and anxious, you’re left with a trade-off: would you rather be more depressed, or more anxious? For some people it’s not worth it. For others, it works well if paired with another drug. My ex-girlfriend found that Prozac gave her (+1 to save vs. Depression; +2 to save vs. Anxiety), Wellbutrin gave her (+3 to save vs. Depression; -1 to save vs. Anxiety), and the combination left her with (+4 vs. Depression; +1 vs. Anxiety)
If you’re one of the rare people who have melancholic depression rather than the much-more-common “atypical depression”, it may be a similar trade-off.
If you have a bi-polar disorder, you want to stay far away from Wellbutrin.
If your symptoms look like depression but are actually hypothyroidy, hypoglycemia, diabetes, sleep apnea, narcolepsy, gluten intolerance, malnourishment, fribromyalgia, or lupus, Wellbutrin will probably help a little bit but might be quite unpleasant.
kupo – That’s really creepy, especially for a school-age person. Don’t blame you one bit for going out of your way to avoid it! I still chalk my event(s) up to gov’t. snooping, plus, I was 27 at the time.
As far as doctors and prescribing drugs for mental/brain stuff, I think it’s a big guessing game and causes a lot of suffering for patients. Years ago, a ‘new’ psychiatrist nearly killed my then-eight-year-old godchild (thank goodness it was in his office!) AFTER his mom told them which drugs had been tried and which HAD to be avoided due to extreme adverse reactions. Dr. gave godchild one of them, anyway and then had to have the poor child airlifted to the nearest medical center that could deal with the problem he caused. Grr.
A good friend’s spouse is right now going through the process of trying to find a drug cocktail that will help their depression/anxiety/psychosis. It’s not pretty; there are lots of icky side effects. Friend thinks their spouse will need to be admitted again soon. 🙁
wwth – A lot of creepers are pretty clever; perhaps he decided you weren’t an easy enough target or that you’d be able and/or willing to identify him to authorities.
@Orion
In that case my doctor is doubly idiotic. I told her I’d been diagnosed with hypothyroidism and fatty liver and listed a bunch of symptoms I was having that made me think it might be something like Hashimoto’s and she basically told me I was just tired because of going to college and prescribed me Wellbutrin. I knew she misdiagnosed me but she said it would treat the fatigue and at that point I was so sick I didn’t know how much longer I could go on like that, so I took it in the hopes of at least addressing one symptom. It kind of did but it just kept me at pretty-fatigued-still-but-functional which was better than how-am-I-going-to-get-up-in-the-morning. In the meantime I tried a gluten free diet and found most of my other symptoms were improved, and one day I had so much energy I actually went for a run (bad idea, I have arthritis), and realized I’d forgotten it for 3 days. I stopped taking it at that point and a lot of other symptoms improved, including my fatty liver symptoms. Later I heard that it’s really hard on the liver, so I’m really pissed that she prescribed it in the first place. I don’t think she heard a single word out of my mouth other than “fatigue.” /rant
Paradoxical Intention — I’m so sorry, my condolences. 🙁 But your kitty had awesome years with you and loved you from the bottom of her kittyheart.
PI, I’m so sorry. Mr Whiskers sounds like he was a wonderful little guy.
Maybe this should go in the non-personal thread, but this is the one that’s currently active, so screw it!
Minor spoilers for this season of Game of Thrones below
I’m starting to get pissed off. I’m over at Watchers on the Wall, a Game of Thrones site and there’s a sizable faction of commenters whining about how the northern plot is too focused on Sansa and how she’s taking over, and Jon is just being her sidekick right now and blah, blah, blah. Jon and Sansa weren’t even in tonight’s episode. Most of the whining is centered around the few seconds they were featured in the preview for next week. This season has had a big focus on the female characters being really cool and moving the plot along and some of the fandom is having a meltdown over it.
It makes total narrative sense for Jon to be kind of depressed and apathetic after what he’s been through. It would be so cheesy and silly for him to come out of his resurrection all instantly ready to kick every ass.
But some of these assdumplings just can’t handle it if the white male power fantasy isn’t catered and pandered to every second.
Ugh! The fandom is starting to sound a lot like all the Star Wars fans who whined about the Force Awakens starring a woman and a black man. I wonder if we’ll soon get a post about somebody in the manosphere tantruming over GoT?
Oh stalkers. So I’ve never been stalked. (other than random, short term creepy incidents). But when I was in high school a girl I knew was being stalked. Being a teenager and not being aware of the impact of stalking, I was at first dismissive – “Oh he gives you gifts, how bad could that be?” – but didn’t take me long to see how scared and freaked out she was and how it curtailed the natural freedom she should have had to enjoy the last days of girlhood. The police essentially said he was ‘harmless’ and wouldn’t do anything – she said.
I mentioned it to my mom and she said “Oh, is the stalker X? Is she a majorette?” Yes and yes. Turns out this guy had been stalking majorettes while my mother was in high school and one of her very good friends had suffered his attentions. My mom was pretty angry – it seemed unlikely that he would have stalked her friend and then stalked my acquaintance as isolated incidents separated by 20+ years – and that likely he’d been making girls’ lives hell for the whole time (and likely before and after, too) and no one had done ANYTHING. Partly because he was part of an influential family in this small town but largely because they were girls and he was a man and it was dismissed as ‘he’s not right, but harmless’. He hadn’t physically harmed the two victims I knew – but he’d made at least two girls’ lives hell and probably a string of young women in between.
For those that have lost cats – I’ve always found this poem quite helpful to me. It captures my own internal struggle between my sadness over the loss of a beloved companion and the dismissive and self-berating “it’s just a cat, get yourself together” http://www.garrisonkeillor.com/in-memory-of-our-cat-ralph/
Anyway – on to other topics. I randomly bought 7 or 8 traditional Polish cut paper pictures at a car boot sale – some are in not great shape, but others are looking awesome. But I don’t know what to do with them. I can’t really afford to drop a bunch of money on framing them, but given that they’re kinda old and a little delicate they need a little protection and they aren’t a standard size where I might be able to find frames that fit them. I can’t decide whether to treat them like ephemeral objects of beauty and use them as a border near the ceiling in the kitchen but let them get mucky and throw them away one day or conserve them in an inexpensive way or sell them to someone else.
@Paradoxy
I’m so sorry to hear about Mr. Whiskers. It sounds as though he enjoyed a really good life, something I wish for all who have a life. I know for certain that he had a long life and a kickass name.
Oddly enough, three nights ago my cat was sleeping on a corner of the bed while I worked in another room. I went in the bedroom and petted her, but she didn’t respond. Her eyes were open. I felt her belly to see if she was breathing but I couldn’t tell if she was. The room was dark so I couldn’t see much. And her fur was cool. I started to worry and called her name. I shook her lightly. Nothing. Again I called her name and shook her lightly. Her eyes just stayed open. Right at the point when I decided that she had suddenly passed away, she opened her eyes. What a scare she gave me. I didn’t even know that cats could sleep that deeply. I’ll bet that she was having a very deep-REM-type sleep. Upon reflection, I realized that her fur is often cool.
And someone I know IRL says her cat is dying. A guy on local radio today said that two of his friends just died, one of them in his late fifties. Why are so many people and animal companions dying right now?!
Anyway, Internet-hugs-if-that-sounds-good to everyone who is going through a tough time.
In the 1990s I had a boyfriend who was quite a lefty activist. He liked to shoot his mouth off at cops(!!!), and they, unsurprisingly, took offense. They would follow him around in their squad cars. I was a witness to some of this.
One day, I walked home from the subway station and a guy who seemed to be homeless and talked to himself loudly followed me. My route home was through a residential neighborhood, with few people on the streets. The United States was busy with another military intervention, this time in Somalia. The guy was ranting loudly about just having returned from Somalia. He seemed pretty well fed and clear-eyed for someone who was in such dire circumstances.
I called my boyfriend and told him about it. Whereupon he told me that the same guy had just followed him around. I guess that the powers that be thought that we would freak out once we compared notes!!!!
We did freak out — but only a little.
@WWTH:
People like that are the absolute worst. I completely loathe the way they assume that they speak for the entire fandom, and that the entire fandom is as hateful as they are.
We had an attack of those on the Stellaris forums recently, and while I was proud to see that most people rallied against them, ugh. It really makes one feel unsafe.
The funny thing is that George R.R. Martin is pretty solidly on the “SJW” side. He’s never really been shy about expressing that. Yet, the ASOIAF and GoT fandom attracts a fuckton of anti-feminist types. I really don’t get it.
@WWTH
People still think Heisenberg was the good guy and if only Skylar would quit nagging him, etc, etc
‘Horton Hears a Who’ has nothing to do with abortion. Seuss was pro choice. Doesn’t matter. Republicans (elephants, thus Horton) need their feel good, save the fetus allegory wish fulfillment.
How many people saw whatserface (I don’t watch the show, sorry) paraded thru town with shame bells and thought 1)’bewbs’ and 2)’unintelligible string of slurs and, well, shaming’? Ya can’t demonize misogyny without showing it, but then misogynists get to see their ideas realized and (in their minds) validated
http://38.media.tumblr.com/8774161d32300700ee4259696a49c330/tumblr_n7ruu5vZid1smcbm7o1_400.gif
George R. R. Martin is a pretty decent sort, yeah, but that seems to bypass some people for some reason. They just assume that fantasy fiction means “for them”, rather than “a genre which might be written by a variety of people for a variety of people.” It’s as if Robin Hobb didn’t exist.
There was a similar thing a while back with Jordan Owen getting all male-teary because the creators of some of his favourite video games refused to let him interview them. He hadn’t bothered to look at their writing at all and had just assumed that they would hate women too, whereas in fact they take quite a progressive stance.
Paradoxy, I’m very sorry. I’m glad Mr. Whiskers had what sounds like a long and happy life with you.
Thinking of Alan and of others of you who have lost a friend recently.
Loss is looming on the horizon in my household, as daft dog (who is pushing 12, which is fairly old for her kind) has lately begun showing signs of rapidly advancing age. I’ve already decided that she won’t have a successor, I seem to be getting worse at handling stuff 🙁
@opposablethumbs
I’m so sorry. I’ve been there. Your dog is happy knowing that you love her and take care of her.
All best wishes for a continued good life for your dog and an easy transition.
http://www.salon.com/2016/05/29/i_was_adopted_at_41_partner/#comments
Made me cry.
@ opposable thumbs
My heart goes out to you. I wish there was something I could say to make you feel better, but there is no magic salve for this sort of thing unfortunately. Even the good age is a two edged sword. Sas was 16 when she went to dig up god’s lawn, which is about 4 years longer than her expected ‘sell by date’ (as we used to joke), but that just gives you longer to love her and makes the loss that little bit harder maybe.
Gawd, sorry, getting all maudlin. It will hurt but after a time you’ll spend more time thinking about the happy memories than feeling sad. There’s no way to rush that process unfortunately but it is something you can keep at the back of your mind. So whatever the emotional hurt you know ‘intellectually’ that eventually things get better.