depression is a fever.

I am now HOOKED on blogging. Came across a really interesting article a few minutes ago. According to a research team led by Paul Andrews (Virginia Commonwealth University), there might be a bright side to depression.

Depression is perhaps not a mental illness, but rather an evolutionary adaption to problematic social circumstances. Similar to the way that a fever directs the body's immune reaction to the place of infection/disease, depression may also play a role in redirecting the brain's resources to solving social dilemmas.

For years, doctors have diagnosed me with depression/anxiety and now statistics are coming out suggesting that 30-50% of all people will suffer from depression at some point in their lives. I wrote an article once about one research team that sees this increase in depression as the product of a deprived pleasure pathway. Life has become simpler. We don't need to plough fields in order to get wheat, we can just stick a mi goreng packet into the microwave and voila, din din is served. There's no sense of achievement (though perhaps getting off your butt and turning off Modern Family for the first time in the day can be seen as a big highlight). We all feel depressed at some points, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we have a disorder. In fact, only about 1% of the general population has the actual disorder. It's a hot topic and Andrews' team now sees depression not as a liability, but rather, something that can potentially bring real benefits

I obsess over things; mainly to do with what's actually bugging me. Some people think about their next meal or advertisement slogans or well thought out puns. I think about why I feel the way I do. What I did wrong, what I could have done better, how I can improve, why didn't I say the things that were actually going through my mind and so on and so on. It's frustrating! Once upon a time, I thought that because I couldn't switch off my mind, it meant that I was lacking in maturity, common sense or intelligent thought but that's not the case at all. I sit my exams, I get depressed over them, I can't sleep at night and without fail, I always end up getting over 90%. My mind is highly analytical. Although I mainly analyse and re-analyse the causes for my depressive cycles, I can apply that sort of mind frame to anything, perfect my understanding and ask well thought out questions.

Andrews' team came across this conclusion in their research also. They found that sufferers of depression scored lower on cognitive tests but did better on complex problems that required deep thought. There's this one protein, SHT1A that binds serotonin (responsible for happy feelings!) and higher levels of the protein have been observed in depressed patients. The team suggests it's this protein that helps supply energy to neurons involved in the ventrolatral prefrontal cortex (VLPC) which are integral to keeping us focused on a task. In the happy, non-depressed individual, the VLPC runs out of energy and we lose focus. The depressed VLPC has a constant supply of nutrients and doesn't turn off.

The depressed mind thinks less of food and sex, as these just interrupt flow of thought. The depressed mind hasn't been phased out as we've evolved perhaps because it has the ability to solve social dilemmas that non depressed minds can't. Our analytical minds go into overdrive, we consider the costs and benefits of a given situation, such as a marriage or break up and come up with the best resolution. Oh how I hate seeing gray in a world that sees black and white! :(

I think the ideas are pretty rad and could potentially change the way depression is treated. They do however put into question the effectiveness of cognitive based therapy. Maybe simply talking about the way you feel (i.e. Freudian psychoanalysis) is the best way to go! There's no doubt that depression can be XTREMEly detrimental, though. Is that benefiting anyone or are we just wired to think that depression equals bad and hence conform to that ideal?

It's odd, because even this blog, is just an extension of my obsessively analytical mind. I don't know if I have depression, but I think like most people, I could relate to what was discussed in the article. We all have our own depressive tendencies.

sexy dream.

I had a sexy dream about K-Rudd yesterday. It was terrifying and also arousing.

I shouldn't watch movies about past Labor parliamentarians. This is what happens.

"What a DILF (you be the judge)"

Also, Kandinsky is coming to the Art Gallery on my b'day. V excited.

jazzed up.

These songs remind me of someone that I don't really miss so much anymore, which is odd because I couldn't listen to either of them for about two years without feeling the need to cry and burrow into the ground. On another blog, I published 5 songs that represent my life to date but I completely forgot about this time in my life. Maybe, because it coincided with some of my worst moments, I'd dissociated myself from them.

I often wonder, is it possible to love someone, really be in love with that special someone, if you never technically dated? A friend of mine told me last week that when she looks back at her past relationships, she realises that she only truly loved those who continue to mark her years after. I think that simplifies things too much. In retrospect, everything looks different. Magda says that you can only truly love someone that loved you back.

I was walking around the art gallery last week and randomly ran into a friend from my past. After talking for a while, he mentioned something that has made me jump for joy. The boy that had driven me mad for about a year, that drove me into the arms of my biggest mistake, that kissed me only once, that gave me the CD that contained these two songs had felt the same way about me. I never thought that someone like him could be infatuated with someone like little me. He always seemed bigger than me.

Hindsight changes everything. It obscures the feelings you may have felt and dilutes the thoughts that raced through your mind. I thought that I had met my first love at 19. I now realise that I was kidding myself. I wanted to tell my last partner about everything in my past, but not this one stolen moment (there I go with the jazz references, again). It's difficult to get over your first love. My God, I wonder how things would have panned out if only we had been honest about the way we'd felt.

I should get a diary, but I prefer to type. If ever I get upset, I will remind myself of the love that blossomed for a little while, but never really bloomed.

it's unbearable!

So I started reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being and there was this one passage that really resonated within me. Near the start of the novel, the narrator brought up the idea that life is like a musical composition and that there are motifs that keep on being repeated - like how Anna Karenina meets her love at the site of a train station suicide and then takes her own life in this same manner. Or how the bowler hat keeps returning, each time with a new meaning, for Sabina.

The idea reminds me of the structure of a Sonata. In the Exposition, the themes are brought up and then played around with in the Development. They're inverted, given new harmonies, turned major or minor and embellished, but it's still the same motif and when you hear it, there's this sense of familiarity, clarity and unity. That's exactly what the composers were aiming for in the first place. I'm going to be 20 in three months time, I'm probably nearing the end of my Exposition, but I feel as though sometimes I'm seeing and hearing the same things over and over. I feel aulde.

I don't think this is the place to divulge some of the more personal recurrences that I see, but there are small things. Like how your partner smells exactly the same like the other people that you've been with despite the fact that none of them use the same cologne. It's like you're with the same person over and over again. For me, the songs 'My Girl', 'Sunny Side of the Street' and 'Lady' keep being played everywhere I go and I can't help but feel this strong pang of nostalgia in my gut every time I hear them. Whenever I stop over in Singapore, I see the same bench where I rested my head against Magda's shoulder after our long flight from Perth. I don't know where it is in Singapore, but I always find it or walk/drive past it unintentionally. I don't want to know its whereabouts. Everytime I see it, it's almost as though I see us sitting there and the notion that I will never again be the exact same person that I was 6 years ago, used to freak me out. I'm being incredibly wanky (do I overuse this word?), but I like the idea that we're constantly evolving along the same old motifs.

I think I'm obsessed with knowing everything about love and sex; for crying out loud, I want to be a sexologist. I'm concerned that because I'm constantly trying to learn and experience as much as I can, I will never feel the unbearable lightness of being. I was with someone that I thought I loved, but I was never comfortable around him. There was always something in my gut telling me to leave. I didn't end up ending it, though. My gut also told me to stay, and so I felt heaviness.

My grandmother's name is Marianna and when she was a teenage girl, a fortune teller told her that she was going to marry a man named Marian. She disregarded this piece of information, laughed it off, because it would obviously be too ridiculous to marry someone whose name was so similar to your own. Law and behold, that's exactly what happened. You have to ask the question, do recurrences happen because they're predetermined and a part of our musical composition or because we want to see connections. I'd like to think the former point is correct, but then again, I think back to Friday night / Saturday morning. In my drug addled mind, I thought that it was no coincidence that Animal Collective's 'My Girls' played on as I connected with another person since my break up. It felt like that night in October last year when i danced with my last partner. Was it another motif repeating itself or a clear sign that Amps doesn't change its set list?

I often wonder if Maj chose the right guy or if the fortune teller's words were in the back of her mind when she said 'yes' to Kaku's proposal. It's odd though, someone came up to Mamulek out of the blue once when she was on her lunch break and told her that she had to spend more time with her brother. Wujek Waldek died a few months afterwards. When I was in India, waiting for the train to Jodhpur in Jaisalmer, a man told me that "red bird is going to fly at 21" and when I asked if this was a bad thing, he said "no, very lucky hand". I hope so. The women in our family seem to have easily readable futures :) Either that, or the turbaned stranger didn't know how to speak English properly.

I've side tracked a little. Fark, I know how to ramble. Was talking about it with Magda the other day; I tend to be quite open about my experiences nowadays, even on public forums like the internet. I guess the more secrets you have, the more likely you are to talk about those that aren't as significant.

If the musical composition has an Exposition, and a Development of the themes presented, then it has to finish with a Recapitulation and Coda. In the traditional Sonata, the Recap was essentially a repeat of the Exposition which is boring. If life is like a musical composition, (and even if it's not, I will always see it this way) I think it would be like one of Ravel's sonatas. The themes return, but they're way funkier and more intensely harmonised than the initial presentation :) I'm still at the start of my life - my music is only just beginning to develop its themes and motifs.

I like this book, and I like how I've changed over the last three weeks. It seems silly and corny to say that I'm starting to feel like myself again. Maybe I wasn't living my life to the fullest over the last two or three months, but now I am.

free me - otis redding.

What I'm listening to. Oh I should really go to sleep but it was too exciting a night. Crazy how guilty you can feel when you really shouldn't

what what.

Remember this joy?

stuff to do.

This is adapted from xkcd.com. Pretty sure you don't need a date to do half these things.

From now on, I'm starting my second childhood.

1. Pretend you’ve never met, then loudly try out lame pickup lines in a swanky bar. Act like they worked.
2. Go on a walking journey and every fifteen feet draw a chalk arrow in the direction you’re going. At the end of the trip, leave a big pile of chalk.
3. Create photo evidence suggesting that you went on an adventure that didn’t really happen
4. Go for a drive. You can only make right-hand turns. When you finally get stuck, turn around and then you can only make left-hand turns. Repeat until you find something interesting. Take pictures along the way!
5. Build forts out of furniture and blankets, and wage war with paper airplanes.
6. Go to a major chain bookstore, and leave notes to future readers in copies of your favorite books
7. Write a piece of fiction together. Outside at a cafe. Ask strangers when you get stuck.
8. Try and visit as many people as you can in one night, and turn as many things inside their apartment upside down as you can, without them noticing.
9. Do the lamest tourist thing in your area that you have both secretly wanted to do forever. Have an unabashed good time!
10. Hide and seek in the park
11. Go around the city with sidewalk chalk and draw hearts with equations inside on random things
12. Drive somewhere unknown and have dinner in a city you’ve never been to. With fake names.
13. Go for a drive with the passenger blindfolded, choosing directions at random. see where you end up
14. Dress up as pirates, commandeer shopping carts, and have a war upon the high seas.. er, parking lot.
15. Go on a search for as many good climbing trees as possible, climb as high as you both can in all of them, compile photo evidence
16. Rent a movie you’ve never seen before. Set on mute and improvise dialogue.
17. Dress up as pirates and go parrot shopping at local pet stores
18. Go to the airport, get the cheapest, soonest departing flight to anywhere when you show up, and stay there for a weekend.
19. Walk around a city and perform short silent plays in front of security cameras
20. In the middle of the night, drive to the beach, so you arrive just as the sun is rising. Have a breakfast picnic, then fall asleep together. Bring a sun umbrella.
21. Dress up as superheros and stop at least one petty crime “ie. jaywalking, littering….”
22. Go to a minor league baseball game under the stars. Tell each other stories about how bad you are at athletics. Randomly cheer for both teams. Eat lots of Cracker Jack.
23. With camera and pair of boots, make photolog of a day in the life of the invisible man.
24. Walk around the city all night and find a place to eat breakfast at dawn
25. Go to a restaurant and convince the cook to create something completely new for you.