Across the Universe is probably my second favorite movie of all time, Allegro Non Troppo being my favorite.

     Across the Universe is a story set in the 60’s during the Viet Nam war centering around youth in America at the time.  It’s choreographed to Beatles music which is performed so awesomely that often I find their performance preferable to the original.

     The music is just absolutely awesome, the choreography is awesome, the storyline is good.  You can’t watch this movie and not feel just about every human emotion there is in the extreme.  This it shares with Allegro Non Troppo.

     I feel a bit emotionally overloaded at this point.

     I was first introduced to this film in a humanities class that I took as part of a multi-media course while I was in prison.  This is the only class I didn’t get an “A” in as it was interrupted by a lengthy lock down after the murder of Jayme Biendl.  The linked news server says she was known as a tough officer.  Actually she was popular among the prisoners.

     This was a time of a lot of emotion for me and this movie brings me back to that time.  I bought the DVD shortly after my release.  I’ve probably watched this film a dozen times and still I never tire of it.

It’s interesting that the fictional drug Felicium from Star Trek Next Generation episode Symbiosis, happens to also be the real name of an SSRI, or at least a brand name for one, Fluoxetine, an SSRI.

In the series Felicium was referred to as a “narcotic”, it dealt with one planet that was technologically evolved and a second planet in which the entire race was dedicated to producing only one substance, Felicium, to keep the other planet addicted, and the addicts on that planet in turn produced all the things needed for life on the first.

I’m pretty much convinced that the manufacturers of SSRI’s are mostly just drug pushers so the choice of a real SSRI for their fictional drug seems appropriate.  I’ve been treated with them for 25 years between the ages of 25-50 and I’m convinced they are mostly pure evil. (I’ve been off since April of 2010 and doing better than I ever did on them).

The thing about the human brain is that it is incredibly good at homeostasis. If you increase the amount of a neurotransmitter and your brain down regulates the receptor for that neurotransmitter.  So now you’re back where you were with the additional need and expense of a substance.

It might be helpful in providing a window of opportunity for treatment but not as a long term fix.

     AVG rudely interrupted a game I was playing yesterday insisting it needed a reboot, so instead it got the boot.  Not acceptable behavior on the part of an anti-virus program.

     So now I’m trying Avast on my Windows box which I use to play Flyff (a graphical MMORPG in which you get to fly around and battle various critters, party with other players, buy, sell, and trade).  I’ve actually used Avast in the past but it let more malware slip through than AVG but if the anti-viral software is rendering the machine non-functional, might as well let the viruses get it.

     If you’re in the middle of a battle and disconnect, the game decides that you lost the battle because it considers disconnecting in the midst of a battle an attempt to cheat.  So when AVG disconnected me, that counted as a loss, not cool AVG.  BAD AVG.

     Second night of sleep uninterrupted by intestinal pain.  These probiotics are doing good things it seems.  Also boil didn’t re-inflate over night so maybe, just maybe, this Clindamycin is working.  Still waiting on lab work to find out exactly what’s infecting me and what will best kill it, but at least symptomatically I’m getting better.

     Never took probiotics before, always thought of it as some new-age hokum but after this round of doxycycline caused me a lot of digestive grief, I took them for the first time yesterday and almost instant relief.  Last night I got to sleep without being in pain all night for the first time in a month.  Didn’t feel like I was on the verge of becoming Hindenburg II.

     Boil re-inflated again this morning but squeezed it out and only got a lot of blood, no visible pus, so I think that’s a good thing.  Maybe these antibiotics, Clindamycin, are working better than the Doxycycline.  And while they told me these would be harder on my stomach, actually they seem to cause a lot less acid and general discomfort than the Doxycycline Hyclate did.

     Still waiting on the lab work to determine exactly what I’m infected with and what will best kill it, hopefully without killing me.

     I had a boil that grew to about an inch in diameter and would not come to a head.

     I was given a ten day course of doxycycline 100mg BID.  Boil didn’t go away so they sliced it open, drained it, and packed it with guaze which had to be repacked about four times before the wound healed enough not to need it.

     All seemed well except for scar tissue and my digestive system being thoroughly screwed up.

     Then last Sunday late afternoon the whole area became massively inflamed.  But Monday, it seemed back to normal mostly.

     The mostly was I could feel one end felt slightly thicker.  The next day it was back to being inflated only about a third the size it had gotten to and this time it came to a head.

     So I went back to the doctor and they popped it and expressed the contents and sent it off to a lab to determine what antibiotics it was most sensitive to since Doxycycline didn’t kill it, even though it did a fabulous job on my gut bacteria.

     In the meantime they put me on another Antibiotic, Clindamycin, which is reported to screw up gut bacteria even better than Doxycycline.  Oh Goodie!  They also had me start taking probiotics to try to restore my gut bacteria.

     I thought you all might enjoy the warning and side effects section:

     It’s good to know that it is “(rarely fatal)”.  It just makes you wish you were dead.

     Anyway, I’m into this boil for a grand so far and it’s not dead yet.

Bing is, by the way, the Chinese word for sick or illness.  What could be more appropriate.

Facebook uses Bing to translate, unfortunate since it’s mostly useless.  Here is an example:

Nosheen Shah Meherbaani nahe tumara pyar manga tha