This is massively a MQoS Not Dead Yet posting, noting that I am currently in a state of body and mind unlike anything I’ve previously reported on, and opening up a lot of questions about the many experiential states that are depressive in one sense or another. I’ve been sleeping a lot (10+ hours at night the last two nights, plus a couple of hours napping during the day), but it’s been absolutely delicious sleep — in 2-hour chunks between my nighttime whizzes (instead of my long-standard 1-hour schedule), with astoundingly pleasant dreams (one so seductive that I went back into it while I was standing by my bed happily whizzing into a urinal).
One of last night’s dreams was a celebration of the AAA TripTik© Travel Planners (as they are labeled by the American Automobile Association), which in a previous life served Jacques and me so well as we planned our drives between Ohio State and Stanford every December and every March for some years.
What can I say? What an odd theme for a dream — and yet it was somehow just delightful. When I was fully awake (and alert, but in great pain from swollen joints on my right hand, totally unaffected by the anti-gout medication allopurinol that has had some good effects but hasn’t helped these joints at all, even as the dosage got increased from 100 to 400 mg), I checked to make sure that the AAA had rolled with the digital age, and it appears that they’ve made the transition well. That makes me happy.
Then, because I’m a linguist, I admired the homophony of TripTik and the noun triptych; from NOAD:
noun triptych: [a] a picture or relief carving on three panels, typically hinged together side by side and used as an altarpiece: a triptych depicting the Crucifixion. [b] a set of three associated artistic, literary, or musical works intended to be appreciated together: a triptych on the theme of the holocaust | his triptych of one-act operas is unfairly neglected.
But depressive states. Here I’m just flagging the enormous variety of the phenomena. Whatever I’m in the grip of now is unlike anything in my previous (unfortunately rich) experience of depressive states, something I characterized as discouragement in yesterday’s posting, and I’m still wrestling with how to describe it, and how to relate it to other facts about my life and health. But that’s for another day.
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