Online social media, at least the corners of it that I find myself in, or have the opportunity to glimpse from where I wander, pretty much sucks. There's a strong subtext of "Me! Me! LOOK AT ME!" applied to everything. Someone posts a link to something they didn't have anything to do with creating, and it gets titled, "Look what I found while I was something something."

Fuck you. That is all.

Oh the mornings you'll have

I woke up a little grouchy, like yesterday (reasons), but I remembered that coffee and magnesium and breakfast will help that. I thought to myself, "Wait until after all those things are in full swing, and if you're still pissed off, go to town." Waited. S'fine.

Last night was busy, and stressful at the end with the school project bullshit, but it was also fine. I stayed out of Bridget's hair for the rest of the evening by staying up way too late doing online shopping and then falling asleep on the couch. Today feels promising. The weather is holding up well enough that I might try and get in a motorcycle ride, but more than likely I will just take a nap.

That's the basics. What follows is an example of the straight up bullshit that goes on in this house any time two or more children are left unsupervised for longer than eight seconds. Those of you who are easily disgusted may want to look away.

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Bridget left the house early enough to be to work by 7AM, so the girls' morning routine was all on me. Caden takes care of himself just fine, he's waking up to his own alarm and not depending on his parents, which is nice.

Sarah needed a shower this morning, because we were all up late last night finishing her school project, which she should have worked on last weekend (but I failed to push her hard enough on that), and for the last few days there just hasn't been a lot of time for her to do it at home. Not to mention that her teacher apparently instructed them that the project had to be worked on entirely at home. Thank you, teachers, for forcing parents to essentially drop anything else out of their schedules so that they can oversee a big fifth grade project. I have to admit that I fail to see the usefulness of pasting crap onto posterboard as well.

Anyway, I woke Sarah at 7AM, she wanted to hit the snooze button, so I gave her a few minutes. Which turned into a half hour, because I also had to shepherd Megan through breakfast (fully one-half of one French toast stick), and then convince her to stay on track so we'd have time to do her Cindy Lou Who hair. Because it's Grinch Day at school and she wants to be Cindy Lou Who.

I finally get Megan's hair done at 8:05, and it's awesome. We were supposed to have left the house ten minutes earlier. Sarah is just at that moment done with her shower and dressed, hair unbrushed. She still has incomplete homework to finish. We're already late. I'm already late for work, and because I'm going to have to drop them at the school (because Sarah has her fucking posterboard to carry, and pieces are already falling off of it), I'm not going to be at my desk until 8:45.

Also, I have to take visit the WC, and it's not going to be pleasant.

I say to the girls, both sitting at the kitchen table, Sarah working on homework and Megan mulling over how she's going to annoy Sarah: "I have to poo. Do not fight. If I have to get off the toilet mid-poo, and come down here to break up a fight with poo still hanging from my butt, you're not going to like it."

Sarah screwed up her face, and rightfully so. I continued. "If you don't want to think about that, don't fight." I tell Megan that she should go somewhere else, but "I wanna be with Sarah." Fine. Fine. You have accepted the consequences of your actions.

Needless to say, I had to get off the toilet mid-poo and come downstairs to break up their fight. I was fucking livid, and I yelled. And I swore. They deserved it.

Yes, we all were calm and happy by the time I dropped them off at school. Here's how the investigation of "WTF happened?" went down:

• I am alerted to trouble by one of the girls screaming. I scream back, from way upstairs. This accomplishes nothing.
• Megan then screams, quite loudly, forcing me into action.
• After the aforementioned yelling, I learn that Megan was screaming because Sarah "did something" (which I now forget, but which I guarantee was not screamworthy).
• Sarah reports that she "had to," because Megan took her pencil and threw it.
• Megan reports that she threw the pencil because Sarah was stabbing her in the arm with it.
• Sarah says she was not stabbing Megan at all
• Megan backpedals to "Well, Sarah was squeezing my arm, and I felt like Sarah might stab me with the pencil." (That's not an invalid feeling.)
• Sarah "had to" squeeze Megan's arm because

-- Parental short term memory failure --

What sparked this whole thing was that Sarah wanted to see if Megan could give her some game items in the online game Animal Jam, so that Sarah could test out a "demonic ritual" that she's seen a video of on YouTube. "I know it's not real, but I wanna test it," she says. Megan is not to that point yet. She doesn't understand that just because someone made a YouTube video of something that doesn't make it real, and she got a little freaked out, and didn't want to have that conversation with Sarah.

My final advice to both of them was, "Sarah, you know that Megan doesn't like to talk about that kind of thing, that it scares her. I know it doesn't scare you and that you know it's not real, but she hasn't entirely figured that out yet. So don't have those kinds of conversations with her."

"And both of you: a conversation should never rise to physical violence, and certainly not to the point where a parent has to interrupt their difficult time on the toilet to come referee it."

Grouchy and wiggly

Yesterday: was okay until all the days events piled up on each other, with me working on my laptop on the counter at YPAC at 8PM, the girls fighting with each other, and all of us having to get packed up and out of the house to go home, then Bridget and Caden arriving shortly after we got home, and my having to answer to Bridget about the status of Sarah's school project, which she was supposed to have worked on at YPAC and kind of did but not nearly enough, which I felt like was my failure, and Caden was standing there (no, kind of dancing around) listening to me. That was really the only "bad" event of the day, and I managed to push through it by sitting in a chair. Fatigue was high in the afternoon.

Today, woke up grouchy, because reasons, turned out it wasn't anything coffee and magnesium couldn't fix. The reasons remain, I just gave less of a shit about them. Weird wiggly-head fatigue this afternoon, but I closed my eyes for a while and I'm all right enough.

I was actually kind of talking and singing to myself out loud this morning after my conference call, and looking for the video camera tripod so that I could make a video of me cooking my favorite breakfast food. Couldn't find it, though, and I was too hungry to look very hard.

Thinking about taking advantage of 57 degrees Fahrenheit to go for a motorcycle ride, but that might require a level of preparation and motivation that I am unwilling to summon at the moment.

Wow, this thing is still here?

Time to repurpose this place.

I've been on duloxetine hydrochloride (generic for Cymbalta) for about two years? Eighteen months? And I'm better for it. But a series of events has led me to stop, not the least of which is some withdrawal symptoms I seem to be experiencing. The primary symptoms are a weird intermittent dizziness that feels like a combination of dehydration and lack of sleep (but addressing both of those conditions doesn't seem to have an effect), and heavy fatigue. I'm already a professional napper, and the fatigue is making that "worse" or "better," depending on your perspective.

Anyway, Bridget suggested (read: insisted) that I keep a log of how I'm doing in the wake of coming off of the duloxetine HCl. I concur.

My idea for this log format is to, each day, talk about what yesterday was like, and what I think today will be like, in terms of physical and mental conditions. Let's begin.

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Yesterday was kind of a long day for me, but I took it in stride. I had a lot of running around to do for tests pursuant to my follow-up doctor's appointment next Thursday, and I had some confusion about whether or not I had all the test orders in hand. I did, but I didn't recognize the blood test order as being what it was until being on the phone with the doctor's office to get them to send it to me ... while I was holding it in my hand for the nth time that day.

I did find myself being surprisingly outgoing and personable yesterday with all the people I interacted with. Kind of surprised myself a bit there, but it was real nice to get out of the house and go gallivanting around among other humans. I did have some unscheduled grieving right at the end of my CT scan in the morning, probably brought on from a lack of breakfast and not enough coffee, combined with the weirdness of the test and the weirdness of being around adults in public during the day. Oh, also, because I haven't really sorted out my father's dying and death (two separate things) and serious consideration of my own mortality and its greater consequences, both of which came in a one-two punch back in July. The woman doing the testing was great about it, though, and I got myself together for the most part. It'll come back around again, I'm sure, but I wasn't unhealthy in my thoughts yesterday, even though I was upset.

Dizziness was not really an issue yesterday, fatigue was. Some of that was Monday's busy and eventful day (Sarah's play, Caden's guitar), and then not getting to bed until late, having to wake up at 6AM to take Caden to school.

What of today? I've got a little dizziness sitting here at the desk, but it's not severe. I am a little tired, we'll see how this afternoon goes. Mood-wise, I'm still riding yesterday's wave of "being a good person" and "making other people happy, even if just a little bit for a moment." It's also nice to have a little break from that, feed the introvert kind of thing. Bridget is at work, kids are at school, there's something to be said for an empty house.

My prediction for today is that I'll be all right, a little tired, but not down on myself. Megan has classes at YPAC tonight, maybe I'll take her and do some "talking to adult humans" while she's in class, to keep that wave going.

Well, it's been a long time again. Short updates since the last post:

1. Caden is now four and a half. He reads everything, with proper inflection even.
2. Sarah just turned two.
3. #3 is on the way, to be birthed in late February 2008.
4. I'm on another anti-depressant, Wellbutrin (or rather Bupropiol, also marketed as Zyban, for smoking cessation).
5. Pursuant to #4, I have quit smoking, for about three or four weeks
6. I've been working in the Loop for almost a year, now at my second job there, in the shadow of the Sears Tower.

Bridget had a complete breakdown when she found out she was pregnant, which was about three months ago. She called my cell phone at work, and was so hysterical that I thought something tragic had happened to one or both of our children. When she was finally able to get out that she was pregnant, I was relieved. I went home, because she was going to work that night. She's not freaking out about it anymore, but she's also not said anything positive about having a third child.

The only thing close to positive was her getting upset about having a stomach bug last night, which she thought was food poisoning from the crappy A&W food we ate, and which she believed might be putting the fetus in danger. So, not happy about it, but sad about the possibility of it ending prematurely.

Sunday was not a good day.

Bridget left for work in the morning, going to her regular retail manager job (which she's going to quit, but that's another story). Caden refused to go to sleep. I got really upset, put a giant hole in the drywall in the hallway upstairs, called Bridget and she came home to rescue me.

Bridget can get him to sleep without any trouble. Her mom can get him to sleep without any trouble. Her sister can get him to sleep without any trouble. He hates me. Or at least that's how it felt yesterday morning.

Since then, everyone has assured me that that's completely normal, and it's nothing I'm doing wrong. So now I just have to patch the gigantic hole in the wall.

Saturday was not a good day.

Caden had his poop the night before, so I was expecting him to be in good spirits. He wasn't. Here's how it went instead. Hour long screaming fit, sleep for fifteen minutes, hour long screaming fit, sleep for fifteen minutes, etc. I got mad. I yelled and threw stuff and punched the wall once hard enough that my knuckles are still a bit tender this morning. There were a couple of times in between the screaming fits where he'd be happy and smiling for about 80 seconds.

He didn't sleep much all day, and finally went down for a long time at 9 PM. I'm sure he was overtired, and that was what was making him grouchy, but he refused to sleep. Oh yeah, I got my teeth cleaned and had a headache most of the day because I hadn't had any coffee. I finally had coffee at about 7 PM, and things started to settle down then, too.

I pulled all the video off of the camera overnight last night. I'm going to assemble it into a montage and send it to my mom in Florida. I'm glad I finally get a chance to play with Windows Movie Maker. I'm not sure yet whether I should try and create a video file on CD, or pump it back out to the camera and then to videotape. Or maybe both. We need to buy a new VCR, since ours is all sucky.