you know that some day I’ll walk out of here again

It has come to my attention that I need a vacation. Alone. In the desert or up the Central Coast. I usually do this twice a year and it’s one of the things that keeps me from completing my transformation into Howard Beale.

It doesn’t have to be long or cost a lot of money. A long weekend, two overnights in a cheap motel, and a digestible series of patty melts will do if the scenery is okay. That’s great news, because I’m completely broke, too.

The Fix My Damn Brain project ate everything for a year, starting with my time. Neurofeedback, which ends at least temporarily on Tuesday, will have lasted almost 11 months straight with no breaks, twice a week with some extra days. Forty-seven weeks! No leaving town or taking time off. Plus shrink lady once a week and doctor once a month. Plus doing enough of my job that I didn’t get fired. I’m a little surprised thisl happened at all.

And it ate all my money too. In theory I’m getting reimbursed for some of this stuff at least, but out of pocket for the period since NFB start includes

Neurofeedback: $8930 <- !!!!!
Shrink: $6815 <- !!!
Drugs: $2200 (est) <- !

Oh hey look, it's almost $18,000. No wonder I'm in the hole. Must defeat ADD and get that paperwork done. If I can get even half of that back…

didja hear didja hear didja hear

There should be a word for news items which you know, the moment you see them, will be all over your LiveJournal and blogroll and feeds for the next 48-72 hours and will then become part of the permanent library of events referred to in these media.

Not “meme” but something that is more specifically limited to stories reported in mass media. Examples have varied in real-world importance from gigantic world-changing disasters or triumphs of good over evil down to pointless “oddly enough,” but there’s some characteristic quality that I can’t identify here that makes me say “well, I’ll be seeing this shit on my friends page for a while now” when I see it.

My guess at the moment is that certain stories flick a switch that makes us say “I must tell others about this and talk about it” that is independent of any judgment about the importance of the story or the likelihood that you’ll be the first to tell anyone about it. I bet if they ever localize this thing in the brain it’ll be in the same nerve bundle as whatever makes us talk about the weather.

The item that sparked this line of thought was of course today’s death of a minor celebrity, which is almost entirely at the trivial end of the scale, only escaping the “oddly enough” silliness because it involves one actual death of a human.

Where we sat at lunch

What were the cliques at your high school or equivalent (ages 14 to 18)?

Clarification: This isn’t a request for your particular affiliation or lack thereof; there’s loads of quizzes and “memes” where you can relive that for good or for ill. I’m fishing for descriptions of the social groups from your teen years as you observed them, whether from the inside or the outside. It’s a survey of environments: what were the groups you saw? If you weren’t at anything like a school with social groups then, none of this really matters.

I went to an almost entirely white public school in a Southern California beach resort town from 1979 to 1983. Think Fast Times at Ridgemont High. So, mine were, in roughly hierarchical order:

Preppy/”Sosh” (rich pretty kids or those who could pass for rich, anyway): pink and green clothing, lots of chinos and khaki, cashmere sweater knotted around the neck, penny loafers.

Jock/Cheerleader (sports and beauty competition winners in the classic American vein)

Surfer (specific to my locale; not quite the same as jock: they were too obsessive about surfing to participate in much of anything else or deal with the hierarchy at all)

“Band-O”: marching band members as obsessive social phenomenon

Theater club: actors singers dancers and technical theater types and wannabees

Pop Music Lifestyle Subculture: at the time this meant rockabilly revival kids, metalheads, and some of the new wave stuff.

Mods and Punks: this was the early 1980s, so a Mod Ska/The Jam flavored revival was going on, and punk was a seriously transgressive style that set you apart. the two groups were pretty interchangeable because they were scarier than the other pop music identities. The mods were always high on black beauties and the punks burned things and put safety pins in their noses.

Academic/geek/nerd. You know the drill. The straight A’s crowd plus anyone who liked computers or Dungeons & Dragons and science fiction.

Stoner

Total outsider of some kind (doomed).

I’m interested for a few reasons. Subculture identities are multiplying, for one thing, and most of the pop music-related ones that have appeared in the last 20 years became permanent options on a kind of menu. And high school has a huge presence in American life. Some people spend their whole lives rebelling against the slights they got in their teens. Others don’t ever move beyond the subculture they found then. If you know what clique an American middle-class person claimed at age 16, you know a lot about them right away.

we get letters

Actually, anon comments. It looks like a failed spam attempt, since it was on a post about pharmacies and prescriptions and is typical blogspam, but without the payload: where’s the link to the spammer drugs site? Perhaps an extremely earnest Indonesian teenager really does admire my LJ this much!

Subject: hello
You are the best! Im glad… This web-site is the coolest! Now I dont have to feel so intimated by science! Youre a genius! I think Ill visit this site often. Your site is very convenient in navigation and has good design. Thanks! I glad too see this interest site, I tell my friends about it! They like sites like that: site Hi! Guys how you manage to make such perfect sites? Good fellows!

RFC1918

I changed my email address on eBay. The confirmation says, among other things:

Change of email address request was made from:
IP Address: [my actual IP]
ISP Host: 10.11.64.248

Thank you,
eBay

what

Someone tell eBay that my “ISP Host” is right behind them.

Neurofeedback update: Done. (Kinda.)

Most of what I write about my head is private, but sometimes there are things worth sharing with the larger world.

Monday will be my last neurofeedback session.

I have been doing NFB twice a week without a missed appointment for any reason since last October 12, almost a year. There have been no vacations, and no exceptions of any kind.

When I say “last session” the meaning is both conditional and hopeful. The strategy my practitioner uses is to continue until the client either gets significant symptom relief or can no longer tolerate the treatment. I’m in that second category.

In that case, the treatment is stopped for two months or so to let the side effects, which have been the dominant experience, fade out. At this point the benefits — whatever they may be — can be assessed. There’s a range of results from “Thanks, I feel better, bye!” through “Some things have improved and I would like to improve other things that are still bugging me” to “I feel somewhat better but we need to keep going with this.”

I’m apprehensive about this for obvious reasons. What’s going to be there when the bandages are removed? However there’s not a damned thing I can do about it other than try to relax and maintain a hopeful attitude. In any case I’ll be delighted to be done with the stress and side effects, which are very debilitating.

Apparently many NFB practitioners deny that there are painful effects. Based on my own experience that’s a huge mistake, and I would urge anyone going into serious therapeutic neurofeedback to carefully consider how bad a long period of aggravated and newly induced mental illness might be. I’ve not enjoyed the last year at all, and my career and some relationships have been permanently affected.

It’s entirely worth it to me if the result is good enough, since my alternatives were not looking very good. If you’re dealing with the neuropsychiatric results of a head injury, if you have disabling ADD-like symptoms that do not budge with other approaches, or if you have emotional problems that are life-threateningly severe and inexplicably resistant to conventional medical and psychotherapeutic treatment, then neurofeedback may be worth investigating. If your life is worth living despite your issues, this may not be for you.

I hope to report some good result by the end of the year.

the latest from the series of tubes

From: “The Hospitality Talent Network”
Date: August 31, 2006 10:37:44 AM PDT
To: substitute
Subject: Sausage Maker positions are available

Dear Colleague,

The HospitalityTalent Network has  Sausage Maker  positions posted by Hills Foods Ltd on our network of job boards.

If you would like additional information on these career opportunities (at no cost or obligation), please go to the following links…

Please consider the following jokes to have been made:

Sausage making/politics/State Legislature joke
Sausage Party joke
Sausage/SPAM joke

I’M IN LOVE I’M IN LOVE I’M IN LOVE WITH A WORKING GIRL

Music video blows. Seen your video, we don’t wanna know. But sometimes…

working

The Members released this song in 1982 and it was a minor New Wave hit here. It’s been a mixtape regular for me since. Never did see the video. Now I’ve seen it and I like the song even more.

Effortless raffish charm from the singer. You can immediately tell he’s the kind of guy who makes everyone think “Oh, shit…” whenever he grins, and who shows up and spontaneously causes parties. Goofy overacting. New Wave Girls in 80s Power Suits. HUGE PHONES. The near total inability of anyone to keep a straight face. And in true punk fashion the whole thing dissolves into chaos and hilarity by the last third of the video: people stuffing food into their faces and pushing each other into pools and failing to keep a straight face for any reason whatsoever. I want to visit 1982 so I can party on the set of this video.

I dropped a flash video at http://www.masculinehygiene.com/d/m/workinggirl.html and you can probably find it on youtube also.