// μ = m // dayvan cowboy // music is math

All the drugs I’ve taken for most of my psychiatric life — except for that brief contact with bupropion — have been anticonvulsants. And I’ve actually been okay, oscillating between mild hypomania and no hypomania at all. Remember, I started psychiatric drugs because of depression, which hasn’t happened for more than a night or two since I started treatment.

Then somehow I got into the (hypo)mania that wouldn’t stop. I’d take 6 or 8mg of clonazepam and still be awake all night. Spending massive amounts of money in luxury stuff like $250 headphones or a 160gb iPod. So we finally entered the strange world of atypical antipsychotics. I had learned a lot about anticonvulsants, but this is brave new world to me.

For a while I though they were horrible drugs that silence the chatter inside your head. 1.5mg o risperidone made me smart — as in shutting out all other stimuli that made it difficult to concentrate on the smarter stuff. 2mg made me a bot.

We’re phasing risperidone now and introducing Seroquel. Like with risperidone I’m quite liking the effect — which is very different — but I’m not at the final dose yet. OTOH, I’m still on risperidone, so I might be on the right track regarding antipsychotics.

I’m getting pleasure waves around 6PM everyday, and my first theory was that that could just be the Seroquel (which has a half-life of 7 hours only) wearing off and leaving the 4mg clonazepam that’s still on my daily cocktail. But, hey, I’m on minimal doses of Seroque, and that’s supposed to hit your H1 receptors first, which could mean I’m only getting a sedative — or maybe it’s enough for the antipsychotic effect to kick in — and no one in the world can tell. And I’m on risperidone as well.

OVERVIEW

“Juno” is essentially a movie around a soundtrack, and in accord with the overwhelmingly positive attitude of the film, there isn’t a single dark note in this acoustic guitar-based collection of Barry Polisar’s attempt to be Belle and Sebastian, peppered with the lighter, acoustic guitar-based pieces by the likes of The Kinks, Belle and Sebastian itself and Sonic Youth. Yes, they manage to find or get them to produce a Polyanna-spirited Sonic Youth song. The only non-acoustic guitar-based moment is a brass solo during the Belle and Sebastian tune. No, really. And the B&S song is the only song with a nice strum pattern and a nice chord progression to it. (And they could’ve just used “Lazy line painter Jane”, whose lyrics already fit!) The rest is just plain, even the Sonic Youth tune!

Juno is all about this girl who gets pregnant by accident and decides to go with the baby-making process in order to give it to adoption to this cool family who really wants a baby. You can’t write a spoiler for it — the publicity material gives away the movie and frankly there’s nothing to give away at all. There is no drama, no conflict, no nothing. It would almost be an experimental movie if it wasn’t for the glossy Sundance-like production.

AS WALKING MUSIC

This is good music to listen to in heavy traffic or while walking/standing next to heavy traffic if you have a pair of good insulating headphones (like the Sennheiser PX-200, which I can’t recommend enough). If it’s quiet and/or sunny outside you plain don’t want this — the sun will achieve the intent of this soundtrack better. It’s been around there for billions of years so it accumulated some experience, you see.