My sympathies, mate: you've no manner of luck at all

It's official. Cleo's fubar.

Got word this morning from "Sylvain" at BMac, the repair folk I took her to on Monday, and the verdict is as follows: the screen has to be replaced ($1,300), as does the hard drive, which was doing the "click of death" which I had heard when I was trying to boot her up on Sunday night and really hoped I wasn't hearing ($250). That, plus two or three hours of work, meaning a total of about $2,000. >_<

Oh, and they can't save any of the information I had on there. Well, there's a one in five hundred chance they could save my stuff. Sylvain told me in all honesty that it wasn't worth my while, and I agreed with him.

I backed up some of the work I had done, but not the most recent stuff none of my images and RPG stuff because it was just fun fluff and it's a pain in the ass to back everything up and takes up a lot of room on a floppy disk.

*beats head on table*

Yeah.

I don't know if my insurance will replace Cleo. I guess I'll have to see.


...


Fuck.

Moods and Madness

Phnee's been reading again... ;)

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison, Professor of Psychiatry at the John Hopkins School of Medicine and coathor of the standard medical text, among other notable achievements. She's one of the foremost specialists of manic-depressive illness, or as it's better known today, bipolar disorder (she doesn't like that term as much). She has also suffered from the illness for more than thirty years.

Something in this passage resonated with me, perhaps because she was able to articulate something which I've been trying to explain for a very long time to people in a very clumsy way. So I'm co-opting her words in order to explain myself better. :) (Richard is her husband, fyi)

I have become fundamentally and deeply skeptical that anyone who does not have this illness can truly understand it. And, ultimately, it is probably unreasonable to expect the kind of acceptance of it that one so desperately desires. It is not an illness that lends itself to easy empathy. Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it vert difficul to see it as illness, rather than as being willful, angry, irrational, or simply tiresome. What I experience as beyond my control can instead seem to him deliberate and frightening. It is, at these times, impossible for me to convey my desperation and pain; it is harder still, afterward, to recover from the damaging acts and dreadful words. These terrible black manias, with their agitated, ferocious and savage sides, are understandably difficult for Richard to understand and almost as difficult for me to explain.

No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one's dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable. Madness, on the other hand, most certainly can, and often does, kill love through its mistrustfulness, unrelenting pessimism, discontents, erratic behavior, and especially, through its savage moods. The sadder, sleepier, slower, and less volatile depressions are more intuitively understood and more easily taken in stride. A quiet melancholy is neither threatening nore beyond ordinary comprehension; an angry, violent, vexatious despair is both.