Scotland

United Kingdom and Ireland at night, as seen from the ISS, Christmas Eve night, 2010.
Taken by Paolo Nespoli, and Italian astronaut in the ESA 

The morality of helping the poor family - where does it end?:

David Cameron thinks the UK has a dependency culture and is lashing out at parents who have children who can’t afford them (because they know social welfare programs will take care of them). He thinks people have a values problem.

Join us for the discussion at 12 PM PST or 7 PM PST @ via IRC or in Second Life.

Fuel deposit explosion; #London, #2006

16 hours of shopping, 2 emotional breakdowns & 1 fight (ugh, some people fucking suck) and I am almost ready (still needa pack) for London!

This guy Sampha is so impossible to find songs from. I need to purchase his EP from the Young Turks site. i find him simply amazing. I find here and there tracks but not much of anything in the form of a solid album. Peep some of his shit.

 

Valentine

 

Boiler Room

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I spent the majority of the last academic year at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

It was literally one of the worst years of my life in terms of my bipolar disorder.

I arrived in mid-September and slipped into a manic episode several weeks later. I was euphoric, loved everyone in my house, racked up debt on my American Express and Visa cards buying food to make dinners for everyone, bought plane tickets to Switzerland and Northern Ireland on a whim and frequently stayed up all night. I couldn’t sit still, I stopped attending class, fell behind…and then, my stepmother of only a few months contracted a bacterial infection and died.

I felt a tremendous amount of guilt because we didn’t get along. I wanted my father to be happy but I didn’t like her (for reasons I won’t put up on the internet). I felt terrible for my father and her children but I was confused about how I felt about her death, and I was thousands of miles away from home. I fell down from my mania and slipped into a deep depression that kept me from showering, attending class and turning in work.

I knew that I needed to go  to see a psychiatrist because the GPs couldn’t change my medications and didn’t know what they were doing. Still, they refused to refer me, depsite my history of severe mental illness, until I produced a note from my psychiatrist at home saying that was what needed to happen.

It took two months to get in and the psychiatrist was of no help. I went back into hypomania and started dating this guy in my house who was a year and a half younger in age and about 15 years behind in maturity level. I got drunk and told him I was mentally ill and he told me that he always wanted to be there for me and didn’t mind. Against my better judgement we commenced our relationship. He told me he loved me after two days together and with my mania I got caught up in our relationship. This mania turned into a ugly mixed episode.

He took advantage of my generosity. I made dinners for us and let him make me feel like complete shit. He was emotionally abusive and constantly belittled my education, the way I cooked, my clothes and belongings, insisted that he shouldn’t have to pay me back for the food he ate, humiliated me in front of other people and then cheated on me. He was quick to make promises he couldn’t keep and never even bothered to read up on what being in a relationship with someone with a mental illness entailed.

The only way I can explain why I allowed him to treat me this way is that I was seriously ill. I went to bed most nights feeling like there were bugs crawling on me and I felt so worthless anyway that I believed what he said. I had stopped going to school some time ago by this point. He was the one insistent that he wanted the relationship in the first place but I felt guilty for putting him through my mental weirdness so I never felt like I could say anything.

Finally, we broke up and my illness came to its ugly peak. I had an episode where I drank so much tequila that I blacked out and vomited all over a hallway and then a few weeks later I slit my right wrist scissors. After being told by a mental health “professional” at the hospital that there was nothing wrong with me, I was just overreacting, in spite of severe emotional lability and plans to commit suicide, I decided that it was time to go home. I found myself on a plane bound stateside four days later.

That was my year abroad. I tried again and again to work with the mental healthcare system but failed. I got sick of having my problems minimized so I came home two months early. I started seeing a psychiatrist once a week when I got home and will continue to do so until my medication is completely stabilized.

I am so fortunate that I have access to the psychiatrist I do and that I’m still alive in spite of being alone in this awful struggle for seven months.