I don't know what's going on with my head these days.

Admittedly, things are starting to pull themselves back together but, as a result of having most of my existence plunged into sporadic bouts of irrational fear, I'm finding myself more shaky and emotional than I've ever been in my life. Even as unpredictable and impulsive as I was as a teenager, there was always some factor of calculation in everything I did. Life was easier to control and moved with a greater degree of efficiency. Granted, it's not entirely gone, but without it working at its normal capacity, I've found myself embroiled in small occasions of uncontrollable emotion, which is something I've never had to deal with in my life before now.

Example: While at work, I usually listen to episodes of Top Gear on my iPod (since I apparently find British voices and V-style engine noises productive). Episode S6E02 features the destruction of a Maserati Biturbo as punishment for its inability to carry on the glory of the previous holders of the badge. The short film features (in keeping with Top Gear's incredibly high musical standard) long excerpts from Confutatis and Lacrimosa, pieces from Mozart's Requiem Mass in D Minor, which is one of my favorite pieces of classical music and one I listen to often. Tonight, for literally no good reason, while listening to the choir of Lacrimosa, their voices gaining in intensity, I just about burst into tears at the following thought:

The world will never know what the rest of Requiem would have sounded like if Mozart hadn't died shortly after composing Lacrimosa and possibly Domine Jesu Christe, if even that piece wasn't written by his successor Sussmayr.

I feel really stupid having obsessed about something as historically concrete as that, but even more so that I could not (or at least did not) have the self control to keep myself from doing so.

Jesus Christ.

So we're doing a migration for a large client tonight, which is just a fancy word for 'moving all 30 of their servers from the horrifically disorganized 14th floor cage to the pristine, shining 16th floor cage'. We grab the network configuration from its neighboring machines, we power the machine down, disconnect the power and ethernet cables, and drag it upstairs.

Except we have new power and ethernet cables upstairs, and we're using those instead. So when we disconnect a server down here, we just kinda throw the cables on the floor, under the assumption that we're going to clean them up when everything is up and running on the 16th floor (since this is all downtime for the client, and the clock is running).

If you want an idea of how many servers and cables needed to be displaced for this project, in order to get to the laptop I'm posting this from, I had to walk across a paved floor of network and power cables over 6 feet long, and in places almost two inches deep.

And when you look down at that mesh of yellow and black, it looks suspiciously like a road one would march to get to the future.

...you know, if you could do such a thing.

I woke up tonight in my normal confused, irritable state, trying in futility to grasp hold of who or where I am, and found that the reason I was roused from my state of over-extended sleep is because someone in my apartment complex, someone for whom I now have a great deal of admiration, has greeted the torrential rains and gale winds by blasting Tchaikovsky's 'Dance of the Sugar-Plum Faeries' at about a hundred decibels. When that finished, and the rains had picked up and become more violent, he or she switched to Bach's 'Tocatta and Fugue'. Now that the cacophony has slacked off, Strauss' 'Blue Danube'.

At dinner with friends last week, I was admittedly louder and more jovial than my normal self, and was alerted by my brother 'You are starting to gather attention.' I responded that I thought I was doing these people a favor, in that I was giving them something to which they could afix their mindless (and I was listening, so I can use that word) conversations. Tonight, I feel, in one of very few occasions in my lifetime, I had this service provided for me.

And I'm glad I get to share it with all of you.

I'm turning into a bit of a hermit, really. I don't talk nearly at all right now, as Inna's in New York for her competition. If my manager wasn't sharing the next shift with me this week, I could probably go the whole time without communicating. I miss Inna terribly. I also miss how I was six months ago, but that's standard knowledge now.

I'm growing more concerned about my medication, as it continues to make my mind feel sluggish, and I still can't remember who I am for a number of seconds when I wake up, but I'm not sure if that's attributed to the drugs or the accident itself. Maybe it's just a devastatingly fluctuating sleep schedule. My dog, who has been taking pheobarbital daily for the whole of his life to control epilepsy, cannot seem to lift his rear legs to their proper extent anymore and they tire much more easily than a dog of his age, all as a result of this drug building up in the muscle and nerve synapses. Similarities can't help but collect in my mind.

The Sausal Creek psych recommended me 35.7mg Effexor for anti-depression, but I'm hesitant to take it. Effexor is known among psych patients as 'side-effexor' and a physician online mentioned that I shouldn't start it if I'm living alone or don't know anyone in the area, as one side effect is an increase in depression such to the levels of suicide. I've decided to hold off, since that warning is pretty much dead aimed at people like me, who sleep during the day, have spirit crushing memory problems and who works 50 hours weeks, spending 10 of them driving the same stretch of incredibly uninteresting highway. 5 percent of my entire week, sleeping included, is spent in commute.

In retrospect, that sentence makes me appear much more likely to try and swallow buckshot than I actually am. Please keep in mind: The job is good, the pay is good, it's just... not here in Berkeley, you see.

Post: Nor is it Sacramento, which would also be acceptable, though the degree by which I can qualify that is measure in the number of inches between a good sharp boning knife and my genitalia.

Post-Post: Also, Bioshock is really good and the moment it dips below fifty bones, you should buy it. And that includes forty-five.

In other, non-depressing news, I test drove a 2004 RX-8 yesterday in my efforts to find a car that straddles the line between fun to drive and practical. With a giant trunk and 4 very spacious seats, I thought the child of my beloved RX-7 Type R might be just that vehicle.

Protip: Not so much.

However, it is the most sensitive thing I've ever touched, cats and twitchy women included. I killed the engine twice trying to engage the clutch on an uphill driveway leading to the street and thought 'Damn, I've lost the manual touch. Oh well, it's been more the a year since I've driven one. Still, I'm kinda sad' The agent and my father had a nice little time chortling at me, until we came back and my father insisted a test drive. My father, who has driven a manual the majority of his life, killed it once and immediately declared 'Holy shit, you weren't kidding.'

Vindicated!

However, it is 20mpg (rotary engine doesn't allow for great mileage here), and since I'll be putting at least ninety miles on the car a day, I can't really look at this one realistically. I did discover that financing a car isn't going to be anywhere near as painful as I thought it might be when the time comes.

God, what a fun fun car though.

A friend of mine asked me why, when she first contacted me over the internet, I immediately datamined the crap out of her. I'd told her that I'd done it before, but when she was reacquainted with the extent of the information I had collected, she got really stand-offish and defensive, which is funny, because the first time I found some of that information, it was not really in her favor. I actually pointed it out to her, and she had the opportunity to remove it.

But still, she asked me that ever-present question: "Why did you do it?"

Today, I mined the living hell out of two goons who didn't know I existed, discovered everything about them they had previously been willing to tell, internalized volumes of what I desperately hope is easily discarded knowledge about two perfect strangers who just might have had an experience somewhat similar to my own.

One of them had. One of them had not. I did not contact the second one.

And I'm glad I didn't, because if I had, the assumption I made about the target's experiences was so asinine that I would have never been able to overcome the idiocy of my mistake. The one I did contact, however, had very similar experiences, and we traded notes, and I got a lot of positive and enlightening information.

"Why did you do it?" Honestly, I do it for the same reason I read books, watch movies, listen to music, browse aimlessly about the internet. I do it because I collect information on the off chance that it might be used again. And before, I didn't really care if it was because I wanted to be smarter, or I just wanted to make myself look better in the eyes of others.

But now that my memory is faltering, be it temporary or permanent, I realize that I don't think it mattered enough whether it was internal or external. What mattered was that I loved it. I still love it. And I'm absolutely terrified that I'm not going to be able to do it for very much longer.

I'm leaving this open to everyone because I've been friends-locking a lot of posts lately, and the people who don't have lj's, or read this anonymously don't have the opportunity to learn that I had an accident recently that has manifested itself as a mental trauma. And that I'm not doing very well at all as a result of it.

I'm leaving this open because I'm sorry that I haven't been telling you these things.

So, for posterity's sake, here's the trip report I posted on an SA thread about Bad Trips on Day 4, when I still thought I was actually going to die. If it doesn't sound like me or my writing style, don't worry: Nothing seems to anymore.