I finally had to give in and accept that I am not able to focus enough of my energy on printmaking this term. At least I have a burin, scraper, and some linoleum pieces to work with for the rest of the year, and a plan for my project. Actually the only thing in it that really requires studio access is the background imagery anyway, and if I do callograph I only need the school studio for the press for one afternoon. Everything else can be hand-pressed, and can be done using a small roller I can get from the art supply store. I had thought maybe after soccer is over next week, I would go back to being in the studio on Mondays and Wednesdays, but looking at all the reading I want to accomplish to really do a decent job on this prairie dogs paper, I am not sure I will have the energy, even once my one-month long English class is over. Oh well. I do think I might tackle the paper mache faces and wrapped wires this term, and work up a set of imagery for the prints, and maybe I can print in late December or early January, between semesters, all but the callography, which maybe I can run on a slow day in mid-January when the regular students aren't ready to print yet anyway. And next semester I think I am going to try for a choir instead, for my fun class. I would have gone with a choir this term, but they all conflicted with something else I had to take. Next term ought to be somewhat more open.
Needless to say, my bipolar phase has shifted again. I am actually teetering on the edge of a hypomanic phase, with lots of excess energy in short bursts. Mt typing speed is pretty high right now, and my spelling and typing errors, typing fast, are still low, even for me. I couldn't sleep till almost 4:30 on Sunday night, and if I hadn't been running around a lot during our game on Monday, I might have not slept much on Monday night either. My appetite is almost gone, too, oddly enough, so I am functioning on less than 1000 Calories a day, and have to remind myself to eat. I think if I could stay in this phase for a few weeks I could have all ~70 pages of papers for all my classes written and edited to a professional standard within about two weeks, including all the reading and typing. I still only type at about 40 words per minute at my fastest, unfortunately, even on my smaller, laptop keyboard. Unfortunate, too, that this phase is extremely draining. Amusingly, it is a great phase for awkward or potentially upsetting social situations, since my brain is running so fast now that if I am upset about something, my brain is already moving on within hours, or even minutes, even with situations that in my depressed phase could upset me for weeks. It is as if those episodes happened months or years ago, and are already old history. It would be interesting to find out how universal these features are in bipolar people, especially those with bipolar II. I am not sure if a fully manic individual could really be introspective enough while manic to really make any decent observations of their disorder.
Actually, to the extent that I could develop a better understanding of how my brain functions while in the various phases and transitions of bipolar II, it is debatable whether bipolar II is even a disorder in my case. It certainly will always affect the ways in which I interact with 'normals,' but the same can be said of any personality trait. It would perhaps take a particularly observant, tolerant and interested individual to really provide me with a stable long-term romance, ever, and I can see why a lot of bipolar cases turn to self-destructive sexual habits, resorting to strings of one-night stands and other unstable, unhealthy behaviors. If they can't maintain a normal relationship, they would almost certainly, in their manic or hypomanic phases, seek out whatever relationship they could get. I can't quite imagine myself into such a state, but I have the advantage of over a decade of reading and studying psychology (16 years, at least, now, since I started reading about affective disorders). I also test, at least during manic phases, in the 'genius' range of IQ tests, and am decidedly not suggestible for things like hypnotism, so I am not representative of standard bipolar cases.
I suppose the next question I am interested in is whether I could artificially extend my hypomanic state beyond its normal course, without making myself dangerously depressed. It is probably a very bad idea to experiment with this during grad school; the temptation to hold my brain in a manic phase to finish major papers, and especially in a few years to finish my thesis, might be too great if I allow the possibility of doing this one during a semester. I seriously doubt I could ever be truly suicidal- I am too stubborn for that- yet I suspect that at some point holding mania artificially might precipitate an unnaturally severe depression in its wake. It would be irresponsibly arrogant of me to assume I could manage such a state, especially alongside the normal, and severe stress of graduate school. Probably I can find enough information from case studies, once I am no longer researching prairie dog management, to construct at least a theoretical base from which to consider this aspect of manipulation of bipolar states.
In the meantime, I obviously am not functioning 'normally' yet, cause it is now one o'clock in the morning, and I am only beginning to feel the fatigue, and Tuesdays are my longest. So, more fascinating observations and contemplations of my affective disorder will have to wait, while I finish the dinner I forgot to eat a few hours ago, and head off to sleep (hopefully).
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