Hottie of the Week: Maggie Gyllenhaal

Old Me / New Me

The Old Me was sexy, brilliant, and cruel. I had moments of bursting creativity and racing thoughts of endless fascination. I was provocative in conversations and passionate in my beliefs. I went through jobs like Kleenex, drank a lot of coffee, smoked a lot of cigarettes. I maxed out my credit cards. I voraciously read fashion magazines, tearing out my favorite pictures and pasting them into a sketchbook of my singular visions. I sat in the dog park for hours, making friends with many canines but never with their human owners. I was a strange, beautiful creature.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t miss those days.

But along with these intense positive experiences came a dark side of my mania: I could also become abrasive, testy, vindictive. Raging. This was usually triggered by workplace annoyances and tedium. I was once fired from a job because of my inability to control my own seething wrath.

I saw a therapist who thought if I talked and talked and talked about my feelings, I would come out the other end at peace with my past and present circumstances, no longer angry at the world. This never worked; I became even more temperamental as I tried to explain my feelings to a baby boomer who got her training in the touchy-feely 70s. Her wisdom was antiquated, annoyingly banal. Good self-esteem was the answer to everything. She felt that the Internet was going to bring about world peace. She said that people do recreational drugs to block out the pain of their existence. In response, I shot back with my harsh observations of reality, decimating her comfortable platitudes with brutal facility. If she was Joan Baez, then I was Johnny Rotten.

After this frustrating experience, I avoided therapy for many years.

I eventually sought out the services of another therapist who, like the first, believed that if I talked and talked and talked about my feelings, I would come out the other end at peace with my past and present circumstances, no longer angry at the world. But, she was not a clone of the first therapist. She differed in what to me was the important factor at the time: she was not naïve and held no polyanna delusions about the world. When I told her about the horrible things that had happened to me, that I had witnessed, she believed me and didn’t think I was exaggerating or somehow misperceiving reality. Moreover, unlike one other therapist who I saw very briefly before her, she didn’t instantly make up her mind about what my problems were and how I should be treated without giving me a chance to talk.

But I stopped seeing her in the spring of 2005. We had decided that the talk therapy had achieved all it could achieve for me and that I needed to try other approaches. She recommended me to a particular program called Dialectical Behavioral Therapy at a local hospital and I went during the summer. Mostly what the program did was give us tips and coping strategies in a group setting. Was it relevant or helpful to me? No.

That October, due to circumstances too complicated and harrowing to explain, I had a nervous breakdown and ended up at the city mental health center. I was diagnosed as bipolar after a 4-minute conversation with the ward psychiatrist. I called my last therapist from the payphone and told her the news. She scoffed. “Bipolar disorder is the disease du jour.” Slightly annoyed, she then told me not to call her anymore since it was at least four months since my last session with her and technically we no longer had a therapy relationship. When I called my private practice psychiatrist, he told me it was his policy to cut off communication once a patient has been admitted into a facility.

Once out of the mental health center, I began seeing a psychiatrist my father had found. And I started to see a therapist in her practice group. Not once did the psychiatrist and therapist speak to each other about me, even through their offices were literally across the hall from each other. Then I remembered what my previous therapist had said: she had never, in all of her years of practice, received a phone call from a psychiatrist to discuss a patient that they both shared.

By now the dynamic was clear. Private practice therapists are suspicious of psychiatric medicine because 1) they feel that talking things through, not medication, is the answer for emotional anguish (and that we as a society are looking for quick fixes and easy answers in the form of a pill) and 2) they feel threatened by psychiatric pharmaceuticals which are indeed highjacking the psychology industry. Conversely, private practice psychiatrists feel it is beneath them to consult with a lowly therapist. At best, one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing. At worst, the therapist and psychiatrist are actually competing with each other theoretically and professionally.

I don’t have this problem anymore because I now get all my mental health treatment at Community Counseling Centers of Chicago, which accepts my Medicare. My psychiatrist is really thorough, perceptive, and caring. And my therapist, who can’t be a day over 25, is the best therapist I have ever had (although, admittedly, that is not saying much). They actually consult with one another about me, rather than being derisive competitors, and because no money changes hands, there’s an integrity to our relationship that you can never get with a private practice therapist/psychiatrist. My only complaint is that they tend to view any slight change in my persona as a sign of a manic episode; they’re overreactive. For example, I currently have a bout of insomnia and I only sleep one or two hours a night, yet I feel totally awake during the day anyway. So my therapist told me the other day that she thinks I may be hypo-manic (a more subtle form of mania) and I imagine she will talk to my psychiatrist who will then suggest changes in my medicine regimen when I see her next week.

I should add here that I am not perfectly comfortable with the label bipolar. Not because I think it’s anything to be ashamed about, but because it still bothers me that I was initially diagnosed with this disorder after a 4-minute conversation. I feel my moods are the result of outside influences, not chemical imbalances in my brain.

I’m on lots and lots of drugs, which I have mixed feelings about as well. Sure, I’m no longer a raging monster and I no longer get so depressed that I can’t even get out of bed, but the downside to that is there is a sort of “leveling” in my whole personality, a sort of “flatness” in reality. I’m not as creative as I used to be and the racing thoughts, which I actually enjoyed, have been replaced with nothingness. I’m not interested in things that used to interest me, like magazines and books. I don’t appreciate movies with the same enchantment that I once had. I’m not as imaginative. I’m not as alive. Even as I type this, I’m keenly aware that I am not writing with the same kind of verve and eloquence that I was capable of only four years ago.

So, yeah, there are times when I really miss the Old Me. And then I wonder, was I really so out of control of my feelings and actions? Was I really that bad? Don Riso of the Enneagram Institute would say that my problem is not that I have a chemical imbalance, but that I’m indulging in my feelings, becoming my feelings, as opposed to making a concerted effort to live through objective thoughts and actions. Maybe I’m just not disciplined enough to follow his advice. Maybe this is all a mistake.

And maybe bipolar disorder diagnoses are really just another outcome of emotional correctness. That’s another idea that keeps popping up in my mind. I have too many inconvenient, albeit logical, feelings about situations I cannot change … so if I can’t change the situation, I suppose they’ll just have to change me. After all, the New Me is more “pleasant” to be around. I’m no longer confrontational and argumentative. I’m no longer brutally outspoken. I’m no longer so depressed I can’t function in the workplace. I am, by most accounts, an easier person to be around.

I’ve been fixed.

Lazy Youtube Clip Day

“Precious Box” is my all-time favorite song, not just my favorite George Michael song. Pity he hardly performed it on his tours, but the Danish were lucky to have witnessed this.

Orlando Redux

George Michael on David Letterman

Eat Shit and Die, Part 2

I am taking the first tentative steps to becoming a vegetarian. Don’t get me wrong -- I am not against the eating of meat per se, as I view it as an important source of protein and iron. Moreover, I do not judge the hunting of animals so long as the animal is not an endangered species and so long as the hunter actually eats the animal for nourishment. The way I see it, meat-eating hunters only eliminate the middle man and there’s a certain kind of ethical honesty about it. I mean, how many people say they could never kill an animal, then go out and buy supermarket hamburger? I too have been guilty of this kind of hypocrisy.

I’m mainly concerned with how animals in the meat industry are treated, killed, and processed. Whether you’re talking about beef, pork, poultry, or fish, the situation is horrific. The animal industry is just that: an industry, where animals are raised in unsanitary, cramped conditions with no opportunity to free graze; live short, unsatisfying lives; are pumped up with growth hormone; and are ultimately lined up, assembly-line fashion, to be slaughtered. Recently, I read that many of the cows scheduled for sale to McDonalds and other fast food chains are not even fully dead when they are sectioned at the factory. This is done for reasons of “efficiency” and cost-cutting.

My attitude change started after I posted a note on Facebook about My Favorite Things and such. I listed Kentucky Fried Chicken as one of my favorite foods – a guilty pleasure to be sure. My friend Mark Howard, who raises cage-free chickens on his spacious Connecticut property, replied, “Go ahead, have your genetically engineered, 4-winged, 3-legged poultry.”

Then, another friend sent me the following link (keep scrolling down after viewing the clip for more on this subject):



Now that you know, you (like me) can no longer claim ignorance. If you need further evidence, I strongly recommend reading the book “Fast Food Nation” or seeing the movie of the same name. A trailer for the movie is shown below:

EAT SHIT AND DIE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hottie of the Week: Orlando Bloom

Filmmaker Harmony Korine on David Letterman (the funniest guest appearances ever)

Harmony Korine is one of the most compelling filmmakers to ever come out of America. His work has been described as mystical, mesmerizing, disturbing, repellant, and not unlike a surreal collage. As Desson Thompson from the Washington Post once noted, “It’s as though he’s downloading his dreams directly on to the screen.”

Apart from being a true cinema auteur with his own singular vision, Harmony Korine is also hysterical to watch (or he was, before entering drug rehab). Below are two clips of him appearing on the DAVID LETTERMAN SHOW. Never has fucked-upness been so thoroughly endearing and entertaining. The first clip is of him in 1995 when he was barely out of adolescence and the second is of him several years later promoting his book.

Finally, the last clip is the trailer for his movie GUMMO, released in 1997.