David Dalton
2017-11-14 05:36:22 UTC
I haven’t posted much in a while so here is an update.
These days my mental health is very stable; I haven’t entered into
any four components activation sequences in a long time, and
am mostly ignoring perineum clicks, and am not praying very
much at all.
In my academic life I am a little behind the schedule I gave the
head of the department in the spring, but I should still be able
to make the January 11 Ph.D. thesis submission date in
order to make spring graduation. My thesis will consist of
five papers each of which will form a chapter, plus a common
introduction, summary, and bibliography. So far I have two
of those papers published in peer-reviewed journals. A
third was rejected by SIAM Journal of Applied Mathematics
and we will resubmit it to Journal of Elasticity soon. We
will soon post two other papers on the non-peer-reviewed
online journal arXiv.org and shortly after that submit them
to journals. All that should be clued up by December 11
leaving a month for me to put it all into thesis format. (The
papers will not have to be rewritten, just reformatted to
meet thesis guidelines including double spacing.)
But that means I will probably have to work over the
Christmas holidays and may have to cut back on my
social life until January 11. Then on February 7
I am scheduled to give a half hour Graduate Student
Seminar Series seminar, which will serve as a
practice talk for my thesis defence, which might not
take place until March.
I have been playing badminton (mostly doubles, but
some singles) once a week with friends from the
department but haven’t gone yet to the Sunday night
MUN Badminton Club or the Tuesday night Avalon
Badminton Club, but might after I submit my thesis.
I still haven’t been doing any yoga but might dig
out my long purple mat from under my bed and
start doing some on my own soon. I am still
doing a fair amount of walking and no doubt
will be doing some snow shovelling beginning
within the next two months.
I am still on 7.5 mg olanzapine and don’t plan to try
to get my psychiatrist to reduce that until after my
thesis defence, and then only to 5 mg. And despite
what I say on my Salmon web site, I am still
prescribed 1250 mg divalproex sodium though I
have dropped without psychiatrist permission to
1000 mg for as much as a month at a time with
no ill effects. I will meet with my psychiatrist on
Friday and plan to ask him then to reduce my
prescription to 1000 mg. (He has said before that
my blood level is 490 and therapeutic level is
above 350, so 1000 mg should be fine.) I want to
drop to 1000 mg partly because that medication can
cause weight gain and hair loss. I haven’t noticed
much hair loss recently but my weight has crept
up to 210 lb (on a 6’ 2” frame) and I hope to get
that back down a bit. I hope to be on the minimum
amount of medication that can keep me stable, and
think that that might be 5 mg olanzapine and
1000 mg divalproex sodium.
I’ve had absolutely no luck on the Plenty of Fish
online dating site. Probably I will start going out
more to live music shows after the January 11
thesis submission deadline and might meet
someone there. Also for those who search based
on income, if I get a postdoc position starting
next fall my income will be a lot higher.
I still do have fantasies about Sarah McLachlan but
haven’t written her in a long time, and unless I
hear from her that I should do otherwise, I am
spreading my fantasies among a lot of women,
in order to avoid obsession.
My alcohol consumption these days is moderate
compared to say 1994. I generally drink 3 pints
of beer on Wednesday nights and a six pack of
light (4%) beer on Saturday nights. But I do
get a lot of second-hand smoke on Saturday nights.
I have not noticed any adverse interactions between
the alcohol and the medications. (But I usually
take the medications after the alcohol, not before,
\and at bedtime, so any drowsiness resulting from
the interactions is welcome. Also any interactions
are not as strong as those between alcohol and
benzodiazepines. which I have never taken
except briefly in the first couple of days of a
hospital stay.)
And again, my mental health is very good right now,
probably the best it has been since 1995. However
I don’t yet say thatI am out of the low years, since
I think that would involve increased creativity, but
of a steady sort, and of a sort that would allow me
to finish projects rather than just start and abandon
them. That would be similar to Taliesin (Gwion)
keeping “the cauldron steadily boiling...”. If I
do get such creativity I would probably dig out
the large folder of scraps of paper from under
my bed and try to make sense of it (some of
it was supposed to be physics clues). I would
also revise my Salmon web page. I don’t expect
to have much time for that until after my thesis
defence and any subsequent thesis edits that
the examiners require, but I do expect to have
time during the summer of 2018, which I intend to
take off (and hope to visit Vancouver for a couple
of weeks at least).
However I am not yet retracting any of my Salmon
on the Thorns web page, but again say that I
do plan to rewrite it.
Good night (2:06 a.m. here),
These days my mental health is very stable; I haven’t entered into
any four components activation sequences in a long time, and
am mostly ignoring perineum clicks, and am not praying very
much at all.
In my academic life I am a little behind the schedule I gave the
head of the department in the spring, but I should still be able
to make the January 11 Ph.D. thesis submission date in
order to make spring graduation. My thesis will consist of
five papers each of which will form a chapter, plus a common
introduction, summary, and bibliography. So far I have two
of those papers published in peer-reviewed journals. A
third was rejected by SIAM Journal of Applied Mathematics
and we will resubmit it to Journal of Elasticity soon. We
will soon post two other papers on the non-peer-reviewed
online journal arXiv.org and shortly after that submit them
to journals. All that should be clued up by December 11
leaving a month for me to put it all into thesis format. (The
papers will not have to be rewritten, just reformatted to
meet thesis guidelines including double spacing.)
But that means I will probably have to work over the
Christmas holidays and may have to cut back on my
social life until January 11. Then on February 7
I am scheduled to give a half hour Graduate Student
Seminar Series seminar, which will serve as a
practice talk for my thesis defence, which might not
take place until March.
I have been playing badminton (mostly doubles, but
some singles) once a week with friends from the
department but haven’t gone yet to the Sunday night
MUN Badminton Club or the Tuesday night Avalon
Badminton Club, but might after I submit my thesis.
I still haven’t been doing any yoga but might dig
out my long purple mat from under my bed and
start doing some on my own soon. I am still
doing a fair amount of walking and no doubt
will be doing some snow shovelling beginning
within the next two months.
I am still on 7.5 mg olanzapine and don’t plan to try
to get my psychiatrist to reduce that until after my
thesis defence, and then only to 5 mg. And despite
what I say on my Salmon web site, I am still
prescribed 1250 mg divalproex sodium though I
have dropped without psychiatrist permission to
1000 mg for as much as a month at a time with
no ill effects. I will meet with my psychiatrist on
Friday and plan to ask him then to reduce my
prescription to 1000 mg. (He has said before that
my blood level is 490 and therapeutic level is
above 350, so 1000 mg should be fine.) I want to
drop to 1000 mg partly because that medication can
cause weight gain and hair loss. I haven’t noticed
much hair loss recently but my weight has crept
up to 210 lb (on a 6’ 2” frame) and I hope to get
that back down a bit. I hope to be on the minimum
amount of medication that can keep me stable, and
think that that might be 5 mg olanzapine and
1000 mg divalproex sodium.
I’ve had absolutely no luck on the Plenty of Fish
online dating site. Probably I will start going out
more to live music shows after the January 11
thesis submission deadline and might meet
someone there. Also for those who search based
on income, if I get a postdoc position starting
next fall my income will be a lot higher.
I still do have fantasies about Sarah McLachlan but
haven’t written her in a long time, and unless I
hear from her that I should do otherwise, I am
spreading my fantasies among a lot of women,
in order to avoid obsession.
My alcohol consumption these days is moderate
compared to say 1994. I generally drink 3 pints
of beer on Wednesday nights and a six pack of
light (4%) beer on Saturday nights. But I do
get a lot of second-hand smoke on Saturday nights.
I have not noticed any adverse interactions between
the alcohol and the medications. (But I usually
take the medications after the alcohol, not before,
\and at bedtime, so any drowsiness resulting from
the interactions is welcome. Also any interactions
are not as strong as those between alcohol and
benzodiazepines. which I have never taken
except briefly in the first couple of days of a
hospital stay.)
And again, my mental health is very good right now,
probably the best it has been since 1995. However
I don’t yet say thatI am out of the low years, since
I think that would involve increased creativity, but
of a steady sort, and of a sort that would allow me
to finish projects rather than just start and abandon
them. That would be similar to Taliesin (Gwion)
keeping “the cauldron steadily boiling...”. If I
do get such creativity I would probably dig out
the large folder of scraps of paper from under
my bed and try to make sense of it (some of
it was supposed to be physics clues). I would
also revise my Salmon web page. I don’t expect
to have much time for that until after my thesis
defence and any subsequent thesis edits that
the examiners require, but I do expect to have
time during the summer of 2018, which I intend to
take off (and hope to visit Vancouver for a couple
of weeks at least).
However I am not yet retracting any of my Salmon
on the Thorns web page, but again say that I
do plan to rewrite it.
Good night (2:06 a.m. here),
--
David Dalton ***@nfld.com http://www.nfld.com/~dalton (home page)
http://www.nfld.com/~dalton/dtales.html Salmon on the Thorns (mystic page)
“She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns
`Come in,' she said, `I’ll give you shelter from the storm' " (Bob Dylan)
David Dalton ***@nfld.com http://www.nfld.com/~dalton (home page)
http://www.nfld.com/~dalton/dtales.html Salmon on the Thorns (mystic page)
“She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns
`Come in,' she said, `I’ll give you shelter from the storm' " (Bob Dylan)