What a tedious place the real world is. I was writing the essay that I told you about not writing on Saturday in a rush of inspiration! Yeah, if having it due the next morning can be termed "inspiration." Anyway, it's done and I'm pretty happy with it, and now I can blog again! For a while, at least...
So today was un-extraordinary. Neurobiology this morning was pretty cool, because it's always cool when you understand the material. Also, His Vexing-ness (you know, that kid in class that has to show off everything he knows and it turns out he just read the text but didn't understand the concepts?) was relatively quiet today. Also, my friends and I asked a bunch of relevant, well-considered questions which is always a plus. All in all, a good day in the field of Molecular Neurobiology.
Abnormal Psych was pretty ho-hum. Not that it's a bad thing; certain classes, you just pray they're ho-hum. Not that I don't like psychology (although see here and here) but this class is... I don't really know why, but I didn't expect it to be a study in suffering. That's all it is, really; I'm not saying that's bad, necessarily, because my area of interest, parasitology and tropical medicine, is also full of such reflection. The only way we can change our world is if we can understand it; the only way to help people suffering from blood flukes or from bipolar disorder is if we understand these afflictions. I just... didn't realize it would be so depressing. I really don't know why; I'm intimately familiar with many of the faces of mental disorders, but I guess I thought learning clinically about them could distance me or something? Hmmm... Anyway, today we watched a video, actually two videos featuring a woman with bipolar disorder, and pretty severe at that. In the first she was in a depressive episode, and she had been hospitalized because she'd assaulted a little girl (we didn't hear the details) because the voices had told her to. (NB I'm sure schizophrenia presents a very different clinical picture, but at this point I couldn't tell them apart except that our professor told us she had bipolar disorder.) She was suffering from psychomotor retardation, which is when someone thinks, moves, and talks slowly, and she looked like she was going to fall asleep and go right off her chair. But the combination of this movie and the next one was what was really disturbing. In the next one, the same woman in the throes of a manic episode(a week later or so) was chewing bubble gum and blowing bubbles, all while she was a spy for Jesus Christ and could call up wind, rain, or sunshine at will. She reminded me of a happy-go-lucky thirteen-year-old girl, and she had that look on her face, the one of blank, almost fake happiness, just utterly pleased with herself. It was disturbing on such a visceral level... you could just tell that something was wrong, could almost tell that this mania wasn't going to last and she was going to plummet deep, deep into the hellish vice of depression.
Sorry for the flowery language; it's late and you know what that means..! (It means I start writing like a Renaissance poet.) Mi apologia.
So that's it for today. I do have to admit that somedays (usually concordant with large academic projects and looming due dates) I might not write. I'll try, but it just might not happen. In the meantime, I plan to be writing every day this week, because I don't have any papers due for a while! (Huzzah!) Buonanotte!
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