Out of work in America?

Statistics aren't what they seem: for example, Alice has no employer save herself. For a long time, she had a tidy little business as a financial planner. The hours were minimal; neither early rising nor heavy lifting were involved; smoking in the office was a matter of desire, not law; all her colleagues were virtual. It was a good life.

Then came The Big Awful, with the economy blown to smithereens, and financial planning clients in increasingly short supply, and Alice's interest in the subject, at least as a career, waning considerably. Once again comes the question: what are you going to do with the rest of your life?

See, Alice and some of her friends, those who play psychopharm roulette along with her, never expected to age beyond, say, 30 or 35. However we have, which leaves us with far more time in our lives than we had anticipated. What to do, what to do? The answers are not coming fast and furious.

Alice would like to be an unemployment statistic, but she has failed to consider one critical connection: first, Alice would have to be working, doing the 9 to 5 and receiving a weekly paycheck. You can't collect unemployment without having put in 20 weeks working for someone else.

Last time Alice was eligible for unemployment was 1990, after her last staff magazine gig collapsed. Since then, as a so-called sole proprietor, she hasn't paid a dime into NYS's unemployment coffers. Hence, she is not eligible to receive, though she is working just as little as those who are collecting.

In truth, Alice's vocational calling is sleep, a minimum of 10 hours a night, every night. Without slumber, she is not-ready-for-prime-time functioning. It's been close to 20 years since Alice commuted to an office, and all she really knows about workplaces is that overhead fluorescent lighting, sealed windows, and recirculating air would be major contributors to an increase in migraine headaches.

Thus, Alice would prefer the office come to her, not that she go to an office any more substantial than the one that doubles as her dining room. Comfort first is her rallying cry. Alas, to answer FB's eternal what's-on-your-mind question, by saying will work for food, health benefits, and a really nifty retirement plan does not, in this po-mo world, constitute an active job search.

Is it time for another career? Alice exited magazine editing shortly before the demise of the printed page; she is looking to exit careers that require her to dress in heels, a good dress, a blazer and pearls in order to have her body language say, trust me. I am a good planner; it's just that our Brave New World requires too many economic projections that may well not hold.

So, now what? Alice's skill sets are mostly 20th century. She is a creative thinker whose techno-knowledge acquisition seems to be on overload. It is all she can do to burp out 10 words in a single sentence to communicate on FB, where Alice has been summering. (She is betting FB will kill whatever remaining productivity U.S. workers have pretended to retain.)

What Alice would like to do, thankyouverymuch, is retire. More specifically, she would be just as happy not to work another day in her life if not for the financial fallout. Give her a free day, and she will fill it, or not, depending on her mood.

Particularly difficult is the segue between vacation proper and back-to-some-facsimile-of-work.

A week away with a friend's family on the north shore of Massachusetts makes Alice realize how much better off we were without cell phones, computers, PDAs and the like. We could actually get away, and, unless we are filled with an unhealthy sense of self-importance -- narcissism run wild -- we need some time untethered.

Ma Bell used to say "reach out and touch someone." She meant, pick up the telephone. Alice is all in favor of the telephone (never text Alice; while she can receive messages, she can't send them and doesn't want to learn how. Texting strikes Alice as the best way to ruin her thumb joints, already fussy, forever. Not going to happen.)

She also likes to receive letters via snail mail -- just something personal from time to time. A postcard or two would be nice. Even a personal email -- coming back from vacation, Alice was greeted with 250+ emails, most of which are deletable without thinking.

Yesterday's cyber headlines are like yesterday's newspapers of old: we used to say that yesterday's news is today's fish wrapping. Difference is, now the fish wrapping is words on a screen.

And stopping the email flood would mean trying to remember what is important to bring back into the inbox. This in itself would be more work than Alice deems necessary. She gets emails she never meant to sign up for, and can't figure out how to disengage.

If you want to go ask Alice, please keep the correspondence lively. If you have a job for Alice, please send particulars. Meanwhile, in Alice's mind, she is on vacation until after Labor Day. Not only does she want no heavy lifting in a job, she doesn't want her synapses to struggle either.

Dazed and confused...

as the song of 30+ years ago says. No, I don't know what to do. Not a clue. I attribute this state of being in part to stepping up my migraine preventive drugs to new heights of spaciness and also to the current state of the economy. Finally, my lack of time, energy, finances, and interest in business school have paid off. I don't know any more than those Wall Street M.B.A.s, but it didn't cost me a dime not to know it.

Ever so proud of the money I saved, I do does wonder how I will make my so-called living as the months unwind and the market tanks quicker than a crack addict's high evaporates. The pace is stunning. Fortunately financial planning is holistic (dreadful but applicable description). It's not just about investments. If it were just about managing money, Alice would be screwed. Talk about your ballroom days being over.... This brings Alice to her next theme.

Chaos: It's not just a theory, it's a way of life. Apparently it's the way that Alice has signed on for, whether she realized it or not at the time. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose? Alice wouldn't bet on it. Her theory on the lack of suicides in the financial district is that most of the newer office buildings have windows that don't open.

You would have to be very determined to that break glass in an emergency, and Alice doesn't think the I-bankers have the upper body strength. She could, of course, be mistaken. She is certain, however, that street vendors whose native language is not English have already cornered the market on vegetable and fruit sales. Depression-era apple selling set up shop years ago. For immigrants, it beats dish washing, and it's an all-cash business.

All-cash businesses are, well, priceless. And everyone needs to eat. The folks in Alice's upscale apartment building are all planning to apply heat to food on a more consistent basis. Say good-bye to last-minute restaurant dinners; say hello to home cooking. Alice's freezer is well stocked with bargains on meat, fish, and poultry. A year ago, she wouldn't have known a good price if it bit her on the ass.

These days she takes great comfort in her menopausal marches around the reservoir. Finally, Alice and nature are on more than speaking terms. Turns out she loves walking and even running under the trees -- far from the sound of the phone ringing or the computer chirping. She doesn't understand the multitasking walkers who have a dog leash in one hand and a cell phone in the other, or the mommies jogging behind a stroller outfitted with two children.

Domestic incompetence is looking increasingly less attractive. Still, Alice can't open the cap on a bottle of soda, much less change a light bulb or do laundry without turning everything pink. You can bring Alice into the kitchen, but you'd better bring the burn cream along, too. Given how flaky her thumb tendons are, Alice wouldn't mind a sous chef, but she suspects that position has been lost to what is most assuredly a recession.

On the money management front, Alice as family CFO has been bailing out of financials for the past year, a move not taken with any prescience about the fall of Lehman Bros. et. al, but one that looks pretty damn good no matter what its impetus. Still, it looks like that retirement Alice was dreaming of will be postponed for the indefinite future.

She is, however, keeping her carbon footprint small by not attending any financial planning conferences this year. A week in Whistler with the socially responsible folks, and Alice would have gone postal. (They seem to respect trees more than intellectual property, and Alice has a big problem with that.) A trip to Hershey to discuss baby boomers retiring, and Alice would have been puking chocolate for days.

We baby boomers are, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked. All those great plans we had, the country houses and the sojourns to foreign countries, well, not going to happen -- not unless great Aunt Matilda conveniently leaves a seven-figure cash inheritance ASAP. In real life, half the boomers Alice knows are scraping together college tuition money or shoring up their own finances, and another, larger-than-expected portion are supporting one or more parents.

Remember Goldie Hawn as Private Benjamin? She signed up for the Army with the private rooms and maid service. Looks like we're all joining her in the barracks, at an age when the kindergarten virtue of sharing has long since paled.

Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy night.

Here and there...

The day after I returned from Mexico, The Misanthrope from Toner Mishap was in Wonderland, and we had a lovely dinner together -- six hours worth of talking, and plenty more to say. He is the first blogger I've met in real life who wasn't someone I knew prior to my blogging days. I hope he's not the last.

We seemed to share the same outlook on life, politics, sex, relationships, the media, and so on. The story of his day in court hit new highs in accounts of absurdity in government. He served as a juror, and wrote about it afterward. He was the foreperson of the jury, a job I wouldn't wish on anyone.

Although in Law & Order and all the other court TV shows, the foreperson is not addressed by name when issuing the verdict, he was. So the defendant, found guilty of a major felony, knows by name one of the people who judged him a criminal.

It hardly seems fair that The Misanthrope was subsequently called into court for writing in his blog about the way the justice system seems to have derailed. (Translation: expediency is not government's middle name, since it's civil service, you would have to go postal to get fired.) Apparently one of the alternate jurors found his blog and duly reported it to some official who had too much time on his hands.

Seems to me the judge owed him an apology and perhaps protection for having used The Misanthrope's name aloud in the courtroom while the defendant was present. Instead, he got a lecture.

The right to free speech doesn't apply when you're a juror. Thanks a lot, Big Brother. Ironic, isn't it? Reminds me of the husband of a former friend. He served in the Navy and was fighting for a Constitution that didn't apply to him. (Then there was the mug he gave me: "Navy: Earth Friendly." Sure, as friendly as a nuclear submarine could get.)

There's a reason why I blog as alice, uptown, and the players in my blog go by the noms-de-blog nicknames I've given them. That reason is privacy. Inasmuch as it is possible to separate the public from the private (okay, the right to privacy died at the end of the 20th century), I would never name online my lovers, my friends, the people I love and cherish.

Kayanna, my niece, is one exception. Since she just turned one year old, and her parents don't read my blog, and you don't know who alice is (don't try the phone book: alice, uptown has an unlisted number), there's enough distance that I can tell you who she is. Perhaps when she's older, I will give her a nom-de-blog for her privacy.

Migraine days, migraine nights

Over at The Daily Headache the question has been posed: is there a migraine personality per se? Offhand, I would disagree. I’ve known too many people with migraines and incredibly disparate personalities to agree with that. What we do share is a genetic predisposition to migraine, which, like depression, is related to how we process serotonin, a neurotransmitter.

Serotonin processing is also related to depression, another disease I no longer question. I’ve stopped asking “why,” and, when I have a major depressive episode, I just want it to go away, and I don’t care how, just don’t make me talk about it again. I have a chemical imbalance, period.

Joan Didion wrote an essay in The White Album called “In Bed,” about her migraine experiences c. 1968. I read it years ago, and it still resonates for me, particularly the part about major stress not correlating with her headaches. For me, it is relaxing that brings on those particular synaptic lapses.

Migraines are part and parcel of my life: after 30 years, I don’t care “why.” Instead, I look to my meds to see how fast I can staunch the pain. Those Imitrex commercials are full of shit. Give me those old-time opiates any day, thankyouverymuch. Some are available over-the-counter in Mexico.

(Alice knows where to obtain different drugs in many parts of the world. She could give you the Cook's tour of where to find relief from pain, infection, stomach upset, cough, allergies, etc., on five continents.) This would be one reason why people ask alice about all things pharmaceutical.

I was diagnosed with migraine at age 18 or so, and can recite chapter and verse all the so-called medical breakthroughs in the past 30 years. I’ve tried the latest and greatest, and not only are the newer drugs expensive, they don’t work at all for me. When I have a migraine, I want the old-fashioned tried and true, what's proven to work for me, regardless of any potentially addictive effects. It’s far too late in the game for me to care.

Cure my pain, and let’s be done with it. Forget about my personality: my head hurts; I can’t move; I get sensitive to light, sound, and scents; and the little man with the big hammer behind my right eye is having way too much fun. If I can’t kill him, at least I can knock him out long enough to make it through the night.

The Human Condition

I haven't gone philosophical and read Hannah Arendt's book, just the reviews on Amazon, which tell me that my version is much simpler and easier to apply to every day life.

On an individual level, there are two states of being: better and worse.

If you happen to find yourself in neither category but instead would describe your condition as "okay to good" on one hand or "heinous or despairing" on the other hand, then I'm interested in hearing from anyone who knows what meds will induce the "okay to good" reaction for me and for my friends' lives. Great would be pushing it. Say "fabulous," and I will think you are full of shit.

Despair, I know well, up close and personal. It's when my psychopharm cocktail acts like expired vitamins, for one thing. I suspect it's also the state of many people living under truly hideous conditions, but that definition has outward measures, whereas inner despair flies into situations that would look marvelous to someone who is not "worse."

Heinous describes conditions at Guantanamo Bay or Iraq or any other war-torn, poverty-stricken, fascist-controlled (that includes the U.S., where Big Brother made sure privacy was dead and buried prior to the end of the 20th century) country that springs to mind.

When you're better or worse as a general condition, you're more likely to get to heinous or despairing than to great or fabulous.

Perhaps this doesn't make sense to you. If so, I suspect your are a psychopharmacological virgin, that is to say, one to whom no psychiatric drugs have ever been prescribed. Yes, for some, recreational drugs are the limit. I would have put myself in this category when I was 18 and my Quaalude dealer took checks.

But then the migraines began in earnest and the blackening depression was finally recognized. Voila: Sansert, your link to migraine free days and to LCD, from which it differs by one molecule. In some Swiss lab, LCD was synthesized just prior to Sansert.

The original thought was that LCD would cure migraines. Evidently, not so much -- though the drug's ability as a hallucinogenic trigger is not to be disputed. Then again, Sansert gets high marks as a hallucinogen as well. At 19, no one thought to issue that warning to me.

Eventually, neurologists stopped prescribing Sansert, the one antimigraine drug that worked, due to the severe, extensive and permanent nature of its side effects. It's also not the drug for the serotonin impaired, which covers most of us whose neurotransmitters need to take their orders from the better-living-through-chemistry folks.

For that, welcome to the world of antidepressants. Prior to the Prozac revolution in 1987, the AD drugs all had serious cautionary warnings (one type were the MAOIs: many food did not mix with this drug compound, i.e., aged cheese, beer, bacon and red wine. Ingest any of these or related foods, those magical nutrients would bring on a stroke or death).

The other type were the tricyclic ADs. Gain 7% of your body weight in a month, become incessantly dehydrated and continue to cry daily as before. Not highly recommended, but some folks still take them for nerve pain. Personally, my nervous system's full-body issues didn't respond. My leg, for example, wasn't depressed; it just hurt.

Living with depression is like living behind a mirror: you see all the people in the world, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the horrifying. However, you don't react at all -- a condition known as "lack of affect," or you react badly.

I'm not going to list the 7 or 10 or how many signs Big Pharma asks one to count to determine whether you are officially "depressed." Let's just leave it as for me, January is a month that consistently falls on the "worse" end of the spectrum, and I find there is no such thing as too much sleep, nor is there much in the way of food that interests me, and my concentration is shot.

I have had a few great afternoons recently: a friend took me through acres of Central Park I'd never seen, and the air smelled of spring, a quality it never possesses four blocks away. Another friend made dinner for me and played backgammon for hours. I am cramming in lessons in Spanish, for the two weeks in February that I will be in Mexico and need to order food, find the bathroom, and ask directions.

Still and all, this month is the anniversary of my father's death, and for that reason alone, despite the joy of my niece's first birthday next week, when Aunt Alice heads to Alabama, I can't imagine a January that will find me in the "better" state of the human condition.

The weeks that got away

Difficulty with memory, yes, that was on the list. Dry mouth? Yup. Tremor? Got that. Fatigue? Sure. Lack of appetite? Food, oh, I forgot about it.

I seem to have hit the side-effects jackpot with the neurologist's most recent medication substitution. How else explain, this fog in which I have been immersed and from which I am slowly emerging, now that I've stopped those little white pills at bedtime. After 20 years on one drug, we thought to give the latest, greatest migraine preventive a try.

Wrong move. The effects of this particular molecular combination didn't do anything for me, and seem to have done their share of things against me. It's hard to write when your brain is so slick with drugs, everything you know slides away. That's where the weeks went -- far, far away. I've been so far under the influence, I couldn't see over it.

Note to self: any drug that doesn't have a generic equivalent is overpriced and undertested. FDA approval equals better than a sugar pill, safer than arsenic. That's all. Nothing to do with actual success rate or whether drug works better than its predecessor, against which it will never compete side-by-side in a laboratory. The FDA's main conclusion seems to be, well, we don't think it will hurt you.

Help you? That's not on the FDA menu. Help you is a happy accident, completely unforeseen in any stage of clinical trials, at least where I am concerned. The last great leap forward in pharmaceuticals that are designed to fix what ails me came about 20 years ago, when Prozac rolled off the assembly line and into solid brown bottles by the 100. Penicillin was a wonder drug in its day, too.

How many years will I wait for the next one?

I spy, trouble from the sky

As if Big Brother's newly "legalized" upgraded ability to wiretap any international conversation wasn't enough now the eye in the sky is on you. Or me.

As The Wall Street Journal would have it, in a Page One story on Wednesday: U.S. to Expand Domestic Use of Spy Satellites. So, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't watching you. Seems to me, no matter how many toys Big Brother steamrolls over Congress, results are not forthcoming. The terrorist-catch success rate isn't even on a par with major league baseball batting averages.

(Do not ask how pathetic I find the idea that Big Brother would employ someone, with my tax dollars, to listen to my friend Maura and I, baby boomers both, whine about our aging bodies, her father's wretched wife, or my mother's latest inanity, or chat about where can we go within 2 hours of Zurich so she can get stoned and I can find a great spa the next time I cross the pond.)

What to do? Throw more money away! Add more toys! Play to the adage, "boys will be boys; all that changes is the size of their toys." Because if there is anyone in government displaying the least sense of logic or maturity, I am missing the point. That great sucking sound is my tax dollars, down the rabbit hole.

And what is down that particular rabbit hole is nothing that interests Alice. She would rather stay above ground, adjusting to her new migraine meds, hoping that the one pill that makes her larger will be counteracted by the one pill that is said to make her small. Side effects R us in Wonderland. Sometimes Alice gets the good ones.

Go ask Alice...

for, indeed, she'll know. She has neither medical nor pharmacological degree, but she seems to be the go-to person recently for dispensing information and advice about pain relief and psychoactive drugs on a regular basis.

My next-door neighbor inquired about the antidepressants her friend was taking. How long until they would show effectiveness or lack thereof? I'd taken them both, so that was easily answered.

A blogging friend was diagnosed with kidney stones, which did not "pass" in a timely manner, leaving her doped up on percoset, a pain reliever second only to demerol or morphine, for weeks. She finally had surgery, followed by another percoset script. After five weeks, she ended up going through minor-league withdrawal.

My concern for her wasn't the narcotic (because when you live with migraine, 30 years of taking narcotics as needed aren't much of an issue, and by the time anyone expressed a concern, it was 15 years ago, 15 years past Alice's due date for caring) but the Tylenol with which every painkiller is compounded.

That Tylenol is serious business. (Hospitals use it only because it isn't a blood thinner like aspirin or ibuprophen. It's not because it's great against pain.)

The warning on my current migraine drug isn't against addiction; it is against ODing on Tylenol, which, in relatively large amounts, can cause permanent liver damage. Or worse: a lethal dose of Tylenol is 2g to 4g. So 500 mg here, 500 mg there can really add up. Do the math.

Next up, my mom, who never feels pain -- she could have given birth in a field. She came down with shingles, which, in her percoset haze, she referred to as "roof tiles" one night. This disease is one where long-dormant chicken pox virus (assuming you had chicken pox) re-emerges and plays painful hell on your skin for a good three to four weeks, minimum.

Note to self: shingles vaccine just invented. Put on calendar for age 60, the age after which most people develop shingles. Do not want roof tiles redux -- there's already been enough pain in my life.

Then a call from mom's best friend: she has retired, with her boyfriend, to a small coastal town in Florida, where she believes available medical care is akin to voodoo, and her shrink wouldn't know his ass from a hole in the ground even with an anatomy chart. She can't sleep, and wants to know why her so-called sleeping pill isn't working for her.

Once again, Alice pulls out her handbook of psychiatric drugs, reads off dosages, and, playing cautious, counsels mom's friend to confirm with doctor or pharmacy.

In Alice's life, it's the pharmacy that has her back. She fills every prescription at the same independent store. Forget meds by mail, or meds from a 1,000-store chain. Alice would bet she has more pharmacy experience than some of the chain-store pill-bottle fillers. She certainly can recite all the side effect labels from memory. Her pharmacy telephones her any time there is a chance of an interaction.

(Alice is on intimate terms with the entire staff at her drug store. She knows the pharmacist and everyone else, save the delivery boy, by name, and she recognizes their voices, as they do hers, on the phone. She has the number memorized and has her own charge account. They get a fruit basket every Thanksgiving.)

Useful things to know: barbiturates of any sort will make birth control pills less effective. This information wasn't given to one of Alice's friends, whose unplanned child will be 9 next year. Antibiotics also don't mix well with many pharmaceuticals -- Alice's pharmacy told her that, although it was so many years ago that she can't remember what doesn't go with what.

For Alice's mom, a stern warning from Alice: I told you not to drink with Xanax on the airplane, and you finally admitted you did anyway. Alice is sure it made for a pleasant (and fast) flight, but her mom didn't have Alice's doctor's blessing on the mix-and-match front, and mom could have woken up way farther across the pond than she intended.

Revised warning, emphasis added: Please don't drink on percoset. It's a much stronger drug and will knock you flat on your ass for days even without a Dewars chaser. Alice knows how much she can drink (two glasses of wine, max, per the shrink) on her psychopharm cocktail, but her mother -- who equates sleeping pills with arsenic, according to mom's friend who dared to make the suggestion -- has neither Alice's metabolism nor knowledge of how you can make drugs your friends -- in judicious quantity.

So, Google may be your pal, but if you really need to know your pain relievers or your psychopharms, Alice recommends a drugstore where they know your name, and she is here if you need her.