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ALL RIGHT ALL RIGHT I’LL DO THE MEME ALREADY YOU CAN STOP TAGGING ME NOW K?

Last night, I started working on the 25 Things About Myself meme everyone’s been doing on Facebook, but halfway through it I started blathering on about Lacanian psychoalanysis, jouissance, neurosis, and hysterical desire. The whole thing sounded like I was secretly hoping that the Lacanian terminology would disguise the fact that I am a crappy girlfriend for trying to break up with my boyfriend three times this week for no logical reason. Then friends started tagging the crap out of me to do the memories meme, which basically says:

Leave one (or more) memory (-ries) that you and I had together.
It doesn’t matter if you knew me a little or a lot, anything you remember!
Don’t send a message, leave a comment here.

So I figured, I’d hit two birds with one blog post and combine the two memes together! In this entry I shall list down 25 favorite memories I have of 25 different people, in no particular order. I will not name names, but feel free to guess which one of these is you! (Hint: If I tagged you on this note, you’re probably here. )

1.) The day after I arrived at San Francisco, I fell asleep on your lap at Golden Gate Park because I was too jetlagged to do anything else.

2.) Greeting 2008 by watching slasher movies in my room!

3.) Two days before you left for New York, you slept over and we talked about how you found out that your father isn’t actually your father. Then we went shopping the next day. Come back, I miss you.

4.) Writing songs with you at school or outside my dorm. Being sad with you in general, because it makes me creative for some reason. Did you know that I haven’t made any music since then? Quit your job and write songs with me again!

5.) I have too many favorite memories with you, so it’s a toss between the time we rode through the coastal towns of Bohol on a motorbike to get to the tarsier farm, or you and me pigging out at random places. Food tastes amazing when we eat together.

6.) That time you chased me around Ortigas in your socks and pajamas because I got mad at you and kept walking away. I’m still a little embarrassed at how childishly I reacted. :\

7.) Two words: Sunday school. Okay, I have tons of way better memories with you, but you have to admit – this one is funny in retrospect.

8.) That small party you threw by the swimming pool of your condo!

9.) Being the legal witness to your marriage. I didn’t want to show it, but I was actually tearing up when you guys exchanged vows.

10.) Pigging out with you at Something Fishy after a long night of drinking! (I know, I know, I suck for never making the time to hang out with you guys again.)

11.) The time you left me Sartre on my bed.

12.) Shisha and beer at your balcony while we made plans to go to the Hong Kong film festival. It doesn’t matter that we never made it to Hong Kong, it was great hanging out with you again after all those years.

13.) Those times we kept going to the Market! Market! food court after school with our respective then-boyfriends, whom we now kind of respectively hate.

14.) Taking turns puking in the bathroom the morning after the Hohobag Valentine’s Day party! You tried to teach me how I could induce vomiting, but I couldn’t bring myself to stick my fingers down my throat.

15.) The night before Ale arrived, you slept over and drove me to the airport at 4 am because I couldn’t do it myself. That was really, really sweet of you.

16.) You calling me up when I was in San Francisco to make sure that I was okay.

17.) That time when we were newly friends, and I was depressed, and you sent me that song from Explosions in the Sky to make me feel better. A confession: I actually ended up crying more cos I was *touched*. Yeah. Never mention this to me, k?

18.) Exploring Singapore like total cheapskates: hopping on random buses and trains with no plan in mind, and amusing ourselves by watching the city zip by.

19-21.) Two words: Jef’s condo.

22.) Sitting on the steps across Macy’s while we read through your Livejournal archives. Good times.

23.) That time you broke up with your boyfriend, because it’s when you and I started talking way more.

24.) Smoking with you at the soccer field after the worst gig ever.

25.)The night you randomly came over and made amaretto’s in my room!

A couple of days ago I had it all figured out. I realized that the secret to staying sane to grad school is to simply not care.

By “not care” I don’t mean “start being irresponsible.” I will still put my best efforts in whatever I do, but I will not care about the results – results being what other people might think of my work. I will not care about being the best in class. I will not care that I’m probably far from being the best in class because my classmates have more knowledge and experience than I do. I will not care that for me, it’s the academe or die. (The world won’t end if I don’t make it, but I really don’t see any sort of future for myself if I have to work in an office day in day out.) I will read what I can and study as much as I can and not care that in spite of the hours I put in reading all these things, there will still be a lot that I won’t understand.

I had that all figured out. The fire was back, and for once I sat in front of my computer looking forward to doing my paper instead of dreading it.

That all came crumbling down two nights ago when I spoke to a friend about my ideas for a paper and he reacted to it a little too critically. I suppose it wouldn’t be entirely fair to blame him for what happened to me after. He was just trying to help the only way he knows how, but I keep getting this sense of “What? I can’t believe you don’t know this yet” every time I speak to him about what I want to do. I realize that this sort of reaction affects me so much because those are the exact same things I tell myself; to have it echoed implicitly or explicitly by another person just confirms all the negative ways in which I see myself and my abilities. I ended up crying myself to sleep that night, and I woke up with an awful sense of frustration and hopelessness that stayed with me the entire day. Getting out of bed that afternoon (I slept through the morning) was an epic feat.

I don’t think it’s wrong that I put a lot of pressure on myself, but I have a feeling that the pressure is a little misdirected. Okay fine, a lot misdirected. Ale and Kristel both told me (on seperate occassions) that I focus too much on my shortcomings instead of what needs to get done. Kristel says I was very rigid on her and myself when it came to schoolwork – a funny observation, considering that I don’t remember a whole lot of studying going on when I was in college. It wasn’t uncommon for study sessions

to degenerate into drinking sessions within the hour

with a lot of gratuitous boob-grabbing in between.

(I kid you not when I say I didn’t learn jack shit about academic things in college. So now you probably understand why I’m constantly asking myself what the hell I’m doing in grad school.)

Anyway, so Kristel was telling me there’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to get things done perfectly. My problem is that instead of just getting things done, my mind goes overdrive on the “perfectly” part and the insecurities that come along with it. Whenever I do anything academic, I work work work for a while and out of nowhere I freeze, panic, and think:

“Gah, I can’t do this.”
“Oh god, why am I not as smart as my classmates?”
“Maybe I’m better off being an office monkey.”
And the penultimate, “What am I doing with my life?”

So, now. The Rules To Staying Sane In Grad School:

1.) I will not care (see first paragraph).
2.) I will take things as slowly as time will allow me and do things one step at a time.
3.) I will lighten up on myself, ease up on the loft expectations, and focus on what I DID do for the day instead of freaking out over what I wasn’t able to do.

(Rules two and three sound like appendages to rule one but meh, who cares.)

To be perfectly honest, I still feel mightily discouraged – and at this point, I don’t think anything anyone can say to me will help. Putting all this down into writing is my attempt at pulling myself together, as if by seeing this on paper the rules will automatically apply and I will handle this all like a healthy human being. But I’m just as lost as I was two nights ago (minus the crying, at least). That overwhelming sense of dread is still sitting on my chest. The question “What am I REALLY doing?” still matters and still has no real answer.

Perhaps I’ll give myself another day off and catch up on my pop culture. Which is really just a better way of saying, “I will avoid serious thinking and anything academic by seeing my friends, zoning out to movies, reading fun books, and getting my ass seriously kicked in Scrabulous.”

Which would you rather be:

a) pretty but constantly depressed (and I’m not talking about the “I’m sad” kind of depression. I mean the sort where you spend hours either crying your eyes out for absolutely no reason at all, or staring into space because you honestly don’t care whether you live or die the next minute) and picking stupid fights with your boyfriend just because you can?

or

b) not-so-pretty, but at least you’re capable of being as happy as a mentally unstable 22 year old can get?

Believe me, this is not an easy question to answer.

I’ve been taking this birth control pill Yasmin for some time now, not so much for the “I’m too young to get knocked up” reasons as the “my skin has been ugly ever since I hit puberty and I’ve done everything to make my skin stop breaking out and for just once in my life I’d like to be pretty” reasons. My mom wasn’t too thrilled about my decision to get on the pill due to our family’s history of breast cancer. She was convinced that the estrogen in the pill would transform my breasts into little tumor farms. To appease her I had my gynecologist run some (rather expensive) tests on me and when everything checked out okay, I made my way to the drug store with my prescription of Yasmin.

Little did my mom or I realize that breast cancer is the least of the more serious side effects to get worried about.

Over the next couple of weeks, not only did my skin do a wonderful job of clearing up – I debunked the myth that the pill fattens you up like crazy. The other positive side effect I got from the pill is that it took my appetite to a place far far away and made me almost skinny like a model. For about two weeks I couldn’t bring myself to eat more than a couple of mouthfuls during every meal, no matter how delicious the food in front of me was. It even came to a point where the only reason why I bothered eating was to make the grumbling noises in my tummy stop. Every time I went out my friends, the first thing they’d tell me was that I looked prettier and skinnier than the last time they saw me. That made me feel damn good – but not good enough to make up for the huge waves of depression that kept hitting me once I started taking the pill.

It started out as me being ten times more cranky and sensitive than I usually am. Random little things that wouldn’t normally have bothered me, like getting lost in a strange city, became disasters of epic proportions – and I would deal with it all like some helpless heroine. (If you had gone with us to Cebu and Bohol, I bet you would have insisted on leaving me on the roadside. I would have done that, if I were another person.) When Ale left the Philippines I cried for hours everyday, but I wasn’t too worried since that was obviously normal reaction. However, the depression didn’t go away once we settled back into our familiar, comfy, long-distance routine. In fact, it got even worse. One minute I’d be okay and the next, I’d either be crying for no reason or picking a fight with Ale for some ridiculous reason or another. Like he’d make some offhand comment that wouldn’t have bothered me on a normal day, but because it’s been a while since I had a normal day I’d end up blowing things completely out of proportion. Really, with the way I’ve been acting up the past few weeks, I’m surprised I’m not single yet.

I can’t decide which is the worst part though – the moments where I’d be staring off into space feeling numb and empty because I pretty much lost the will to do anything (except stay in bed and watch Dexter or Grey’s Anatomy for hours), or the unexplained crying fits like the one I had last night. What frightened me about that episode is that it wasn’t just any kind of crying. It’s the way women cry when they’ve just been dumped or when someone they love has died, except I haven’t been dumped and no one I know died recently. For over an hour, my bed was practically shaking because I was sobbing so hard. I tried to calm myself down and figure out why I was freaking out so badly, but that made me cry even harder because I couldn’t come up with one good reason for that heavy, profound sadness. I wish I could attribute the mood drop to yesterday being my brother’s death anniversary, but that wasn’t even it. I had a similar crying fit just a few days ago, and it was just as unexpected and unexplainable as last night’s.

Getting depressed or crying for no reason is nothing new to me, but it’s never happened this frequently nor this intensely. I did some poking around the internet and discovered that the progestin component in Yasmin (or any other combination birth control pill) wreaks havoc on your serotonin levels by increasing a brain enzyme that inhibits the production serotonin. Serotonin is that neurotransmitter in your brain that affects your mood. If you have too little, you’re probably depressive and not much fun like I am. If you have too much, you’re probably one of those irritatingly chipper people who deserve a bullet in between their eyes. So I guess when you already have too little serotonin to begin with, and you take a pill that kind of kills what little serotonin you already have – it’s amazing I haven’t tried to kill myself yet.

Despite the wonderful things the pill has done to my physical appearance, I stopped taking Yasmin last Sunday. Being prettier and skinnier doesn’t mean anything when I can no longer appreciate the simple fact that I’m alive. Hell, these days it takes a Herculean amount of effort go out and show the world that I’ve gotten prettier and skinnier. I’m a little worried that my mood hasn’t improved yet, but I guess I’ll see how I’m like over the next couple of days.

So have any of you ever tried taking the pill or know someone who did, and had a reaction as bad as mine? How did you or that person deal with it? And do you think I should stop taking the pill, or take it with a combination of serotonin supplements? Really, I should be asking my gyno all these questions instead of consulting random Internet doctors. Unfortunately, her waiting room is always filled with pregnant women, screaming babies, and (for some reason) nuns, and I don’t really feel like surrounding myself with a lot of estrogen right now.