Sunny day

Today I will begin with a small confession: I am a little bit manic depressive. For about six months I was bordering on severely bipolar, but now I'm on a new birth control pill, and despite my $225-an-hour psychiatrist telling me that would never be enough to control my severe mental illness (that, in fact, I would require a lifetime of lithium if I wanted to stay out of a mental institution), the pill is enough, and I am back in the realm of normalcy. I may, arguably, be on the outskirts of normalcy, but I am certainly within the county line. And I also have less premenstrual cramping. Win-win.

At any rate, today I am on a mood upswing. This means that I can get by on just 7 hours of sleep, and I feel ever-so-slightly productive. This morning I identified two publications to query, two possible sources to call for information, and questions to ask those sources. After lunch I plan to actually make several phone calls. It is all very exciting, this doing something.

It has not been easy. After nearly four years of staying home with small children, my mind has come to behave like one. I require constant redirection away from Facebook and celebrity gossip columns and even my own old journal entries. I feel like I need parental controls for my own laptop.

I have been thinking a lot about marriage recently, too. Our strategy of venting our resentments sort of backfired, and instead of liking each other more, we came to like each other less. So now we're just working on this revolutionary new strategy of--get this--being nice to one another. We're trying to be appreciative and affectionate and respectful. Weird, right? Of course, we are still left with a warehouse full of unaddressed anger. But we are having sex again. It's really hard to find a downside to that.