Thought That Came Unbidden

Maybe NIH researchers ought to get out more

Or maybe they just need to read their own web site.

Both The Washington Post and The New York Times picked up a story in the past couple of days about a very small study showing that ketamine can have an immediate salutary affect on people who are chronically depressed.

I really think the researchers at NIH need to get out more, perhaps do a little more clubbing and maybe take off the white coats once in a while. Ketamine (aka: “special K”), largely used in the U.S. as an animal tranquilizer, has been a club drug for the last decade (at least, it’s been that long since Ex #3 and I walked in on her housemate and his plaything of the minute snorting it off the Corian counter in their kitchen). Clubbers don’t do this stuff for no reason, guys. There has to be some sort of salutary affect to it. Whether it’s therapeutic or not is another matter.

Does anyone remember last year’s “magic number” ?

Does anyone remember last summer besides me? You know…last summer when the pundits were shouting about how $60 per barrel was the “magic number” for the price of oil (pre-Katrina, of course).

With BP‘s most recent screw up in Alaska, prices were up to $77 per barrel as of Tuesday. The effect at the pump? Yesterday at 5:30pm EDT I paid $3.15 9/10 (why not just call it’ $3.16, people, come on!) for a gallon of regular; today at 9:00am EDT that same gallon of regular was being advertised at $3.18 9/10.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that gas prices in the U.S. are artificially low (go to CNN.com for a map of gas prices worldwide or to their special feature on energy in America) but I have to wonder about all the games.

Do they think we don’t notice that gas prices go up on Thursday and down on Tuesday, just in time for when most people have time to stop and buy gas (aka: the weekend)?

Maybe when it hits the nearly $6.40/gallon they’re paying in London people will actually start thinking about their carbon footprint.

I went and had drinks with some friends yesterday, and as much as I hate smoky bars and being the only sober person in the group I totally enjoyed myself. It was a going away party for my friend Carol who has finally achieved escape velocity and has left The Treehuggers to go work for the YMCA.

And I woke up this morning feeling good, feeling more like myself than I have in months even despite the momentary flash of “oh my god I’m going to die” anxiety upon waking (note to self: talk to the shrink about upping the dosage on the meds).

There were geese this morning flying in formation has I swept the porch, about 20 of them in a messy V honking their way across the sky, and a big butterfly with yellow wings rimmed in black who paused on the bush in front of the porch.

This is the feeling I want, the feeling that today is full of potential. Yeah, everything might not go the way I want it to; I might be frustrated or even sad, but at least there is a chance for something better.

This feeling is the opposite of depression. I have to wonder, is this how everyone else feels all the time?

I’ve been cleaning out my office in preparation for “going on leave” (which is a nice way of saying my boss is being compassionate and letting me take all of my sick leave and then my vacation before I officially resign) and stuck in the back of a drawer was this creaky, old calculator. Mid-1970s era solar cell that only functions when directly under a light source, soft plastic buttons that are starting to get rigid with age, kinda funky stains from having spent so much time in the smoky environment at my mother’s house, this calculator is really nothing special.

Except, it was a gift to me from my father.

And that really shouldn’t make any difference since my father basically wasn’t interested in me and essentially gave up all real interest in being a parent the one and only time he got too free with his hands and made the mistake of hitting my mother (for all my mother’s faults, he only got that one chance to be grievously wrong).

So why is it even though I have other calculators that function better, look better, and aren’t as rickety, I look at this one with fondness and keep carting it from job to job to job with me?

Why do we attach value to certain things and not to others? What is it that makes some object special? Where does “sentiment” really come from? What gives some things and events meaning and leaves others forgotten to history, personal or otherwise?

It’s not as if this particular object is uniquely functional. Nor is it really a gift that took any thought (what does a 7 year-old need with a solar calculator?), so it’s not like it was particularly tailored to my special interestes or needs. And it’s certainly not because my father was a huge presence in my life and this seemingly ordinary object is imbued with value because a person I loved, a person who mattered to me, gave it to me.

No conclusions, just thoughts.

I live across the street from my aunt, uncle, and two grown cousins (why they still live at home and pay no rent at 27 and 31, respectively, is a whole different story). And while the exposure on their house is different from mine (mine faces North, they face South) and their house does get more sunlight than mine, they do something I don’t completely understand.

They never open the windows. Ever.

The AC goes on in March, ostensibly to ameliorate the effects of pollen on The Boy’s asthma, and doesn’t go off until the beginning of October. They spend all summer shut up and listening to the roar and bang and burble and clatter of window units, some which have been in place for 10 years or more and are none too quiet.

They never hear the birds chirping or the crickets singing their “Hey, baby!” songs. They don’t feel the breeze or actually hear the thunderstorms.

Granted, DC in the summer can be totally miserable with temperatures in July reaching 85degF by 8am on a regular basis with final highs for the day even warmer. It’s sticky, too, what we natives refer to as “90/90” weather; it’s the kind of weather where you often wonder why you bother to dry off after you get out of the shower in the morning because you know you’re just going to start to sweat the minute you step out of your house even if, like my family, you’ve got your house chilled down to “let’s hang meat in here” temperatures.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s air conditioning in my house, we just use it sparingly, letting it blow just long enough to cool down the space and give the fans we’ve got all over the house a little boost.
There’s just something inorganic about air conditioning, not to mention the fact that it makes it damn hard to hear yourself think let alone hear the TV or the radio.

To me there’s something sublime about not being air conditioned all the time. Even as I type this a creaky old fan sits in the window complaining but still blowing a cool-ish breeze across the room. I can sit here and safely say, with the experience of having sweated out hot days, that today is not so bad. Yeah, it’s a bit sticky, but not as close as it was yesterday, and it’s still sort of cool which means today probably won’t be too horrible.

And what does being constantly temperature controlled do to your ability to relate to your environment? It seems to me, if my family is any yardstick, that it saps you of your ability to sense the small changes: They only have three temperature measures, too hot, too cold, and “this ain’t bad.” Life, and weather, are more complicated than that.

Me, I get the pleasure of being able to stand on the porch with my cup of decaf and feel the changes as the seasons move, knowing that Fall will really begin sometime around the end of August.

I’m not going to give that up because I’m afraid of a little sweat. After all, that’s what cold showers were made for.

They flew by so erratically and so fast I thought they were huge butterflies…and then one landed on a tree.

We have a pair of goldfinches in our neighborhood. For some reason, this makes me smile.