Year of the Sparkle Dragon: Be a better bipolar

I'm bipolar. We've established this. I say it a lot on here. Y'all are probably sick of hearing me say it. (Sorry!)

Last year was a weird year. I spent the latter half of 2012 mildly depressed, i.e., not actually sad, but miles from happy and with no particular drive to do anything. I'm still trying to work my way out of that funk. The problem with being mildly depressed is that you don't have energy for anything above bare minimum. I go to work, do as little as possible, come home, eat, blog (sometimes) and hop in my bed. Extra-curricular stuff like writing, and studying doesn't happen. Too much effort.

This year, I want to start moving forward again. That means I need to get out of the depression and try for smooth sailing.

HEAD-SHRINKER

No offence to anyone in the psychiatric profession. I just really love this term. I want to shrink heads too! Erm, right. Step 1 of the plan was to go back to the doctor. For about 8 years, I've been off meds and off shrinks, dealing with my bipolar on my own. There are two reasons for that. I have this weird thing about being dependent - which in a weird twist is why I've never done any drugs (outside alcohol and one cigarette). Secondly, the doctors never got my meds right. I was always more manic, and I was beginning to feel like the meds were going to get me killed.

Going back to the doctor is easier said then done. I'm in Japan. Native language: Japanese. I could either go to a "nearby" psychiatrist, and have my sessions in Japanese, but who wants to try and think in their 5th language when they're supposed to be relaxing? Or, I could go to Sendai, 300 km away and either $100 US on the bullet train, or a 4-hour ride on the local (one way). I chose Sendai and made a vacation of it.

Being the most indecisive person in the world, I went to both English-speaking shrinks I could find. Now I have to cut one off, and I feel strangely like I'm dating two guys. The shrink visit(s) went well. And I now have meds again. And have to go back to Sendai, every 2 weeks (for now, because there's no way I can sustain that long term).

It's too early to tell if the meds are doing their job, but I think I'm finally on the right track.

DIET

I was reading up on ADD the other day - yes, I read psych books for fun - and the author talked about a case where a guy wanted to join the military, but they wouldn't let him while he was on the meds. So the doctor taught him how to try and manage his ADD with a combination of diet, exercise and therapy. That started me researching. Could there be a bipolar diet too?

Turns out there are foods that seem to be better for keeping bipolars level.

Omega 3 fats - supplements, mackarel, salmon, anchovy, herring, tuna (not more than 3 times a month for tuna because of high mercury). This is perfect for right now, in the land where they'll eat anything out of the sea. Seriously, I expect to hear that it's coral for school lunch, any give day.

Spikes - Avoid caffeine, sugars, refined carbs, and alcohol. Basically anything that's going to be absorbed into your system fast and burned off even faster. These instabilities can spike your moods too. I'm most worried in this category. I can not escape rice in this country. I'll just have to try and make it up by avoiding rice when I'm at home, and eating more of the fish stuff. Also, I'm torn about the alcohol bit. I'm not a big fan of drinking and I've already told you guys I don't get drunk, but I hate feeling like everybody's doing something and I'm not allowed to. Anyhow, I haven't had a drop for the year. (We're what, 6 days in?) I'm also a little worried about green tea which is free at school, and which I normally drink all day to keep warm. It's a mild stimulant, so hopefully that will be okay. I'll try to stick to fruit and veggie juice mixes when I'm home. We have these amazing mixes out here, 16 veggies and 5 fruits- they taste awesome and are super-healthy. Wish the rest of the world would get on that.

Magnesium - Dark green leafy veggies, salmon (again - yay!), legumes, whole grains (difficult to find here) and supplements.

EXERCISE

Exercise is a natural anti-depressant. As much as you may hate going to exercise, after you're finished you feel happy and somehow refreshed. (Even when you're soggy and stinky!)

Exercise reduces the stress hormone cortisol, helps establish good sleeping and eating patterns, raises energy levels, releases endorphins, raises serotonin levels, increases brain cells in the hippocampus AND improves self esteem. How can you go wrong?

I just got a 3 month membership at the municipal gym. (50 bucks, Baby! Perks of living in the middle of nowhere.) My mission this year is to try and get in 3 workouts a week.



SLEEP

One way to combat bipolar disease is to try to keep things level and even. We saw that with the sugars, and now with daily routine. It's best for bipolar if you get 7 or 8 hours a night. I'm a terminal insomniac, but my new meds make me sleepy as hell, and since I've been taking them I get 10 hours, whether I like it or not.

BE OPEN

Like I said, y'all have heard a million times that I'm bipolar. But as open as I am here, I'm really secretive about it in my real life. Power of the "anonymity" of the internet. I'm really uncomfortable talking about my bipolar live and in living colour. And most of my close friends don't get it anyway.

BUT it's a part of my life. There is no cure. This is me forever. If they're going to be here, they have to deal with it. And if I'm going to survive it, I have to deal with it.

I find it ironic, as I look over these, that being a good biploar is mostly being a healthy human being. Eat well - avoid alcohol and caffeine and refined sugar. Exercise regularly. Sleep well. That's how I'm trynna be a better bipolar in 2012. Hopefully I can keep it up all this year and beyond. Thank you guys for being so supportive all this time.

(PS, I have conjunctivitis. Sometimes I feel like the world's sickest healthy person.)

Year of the Sparkle Dragon: Read Less

Surely that's a typographical error? What writer wants to read LESS?

Me.

The pressure.
Last year, I signed up for the 2011 Reader Challenge on Goodreads. 100 books I declared. The year started off badly. I was home in Barbados for Christmas. And who has time for books when you have to see all your friends, and your entire family, and eat all your favourite foods, and go to all your favourite places, and you've only got 3 weeks to do it? Then I didn't start right when I got back, because it was really hard coming back, and I was homesick something fierce.

I spent most of the year playing catch up. Even when I'd caught up, I was playing "get ahead" because I knew that October is always bad at work, and November is nano, so there aren't any guarantees.

I finished the year with 116 books. Honest truth is that I appreciated all of them. Even the "bad" ones. What I didn't enjoy, I learned from. And I also learned from the ones I loved. But I never want to feel like someone's forcing books down my throat again.

Quality over quantity
This is not about the quality of the books. There are more great books published in a single year than I could read in a lifetime. It's about the quality of my reading experience. People experience books in different ways. Lots of people talk about "seeing" the characters and events. Me? I'm not a visual person. If you don't show me the character in a movie or on a book cover, I will never see them. How I experience books is difficult to explain. It's like I live them. Like I'm there.

[Warning: there's a Twilight: Eclipse/New Moon spoiler in this paragraph.]
It's like the things I read about skip all the basic forms of sense, and go straight to the destination. For example, when you feel pain, something usually happens outside your body, and the nerves convey that to your brain/nervous system, and your brain/nervous system tells you to feel pain. (Forgive me if the science is wrong here, just follow the concept.) Remember Jane from Twilight? How she can make people feel pain without a stimulus? That's how reading is for me. There's no external, everything happens inside my brain.

Because the story is so deep in my brain, it's difficult for me to come out of a book. I lose track of everything. I don't hear things, see things, and people always walk up and shake me and scare the frizzles out of me to get me attention. "Wait, wha-, who, where am I?" At the end of a book, as I've been so "intimate" with these characters, they stay with me for a while. In my brain, the plot continues. The story plays out in different ways. I was so deep in Elana Johnson's POSSESSION that I was literally incapable of following any other story's threads.

When I've got this arbitrary quota working with, I have to force myself out of one world and into another. I think I lose out on enjoying the previous story as much as I could, and I don't immerse myself in the new story like I should.

The habit
The more I read, the more I read, the more I read. 5 books in January, 10 in March, 12 in May. It's addictive. When I train myself to pick up another book promptly, then I can't NOT pick one up - unless it's a completely inappropriate time, like 4 am.

On the surface, that sounds like a good thing, but everything else gets sacrificed. I could wash the dishes. Or I could read. I could plan my vacation. Or I could read. I could write that email I've been meaning to send. Orrrr I could read.

Writing
Sadly, even writing gets sacrificed. Reading counts as developing craft. It's easy to tell yourself that there are worse things. At least this is industry-related. But getting stuck in any one stage of the craft, no matter how useful that stage, is a hindrance in the end. Like me having  a million first drafts and no completed novels. A writer should read, but a writer should also write.

Secondly, writers are connected to their creations. It's hard to form those connections when your head is full of other people's worlds and other people's characters. It's like trying to sing a lullaby while standing in front of the speakers at a rock concert. This year, it was really hard for me to get into nano. I blamed all sorts of things, but maybe it had something to do with the fact that I read 3 books in the first week of November.

I want to take my writing up a level this year. Reading is going on the back burner. If you're wondering what that means, I've set myself a goal of 52 books this year. What are you reading this year? Any goals?

PS, If you're on Goodreads, look out for me. I'm Claire Dawn.

Year of the Sparkle Dragon: Write More

It's the Year of the Sparkle Dragon. I don't know why, but I can feel it's a year for big things. All this week, I'll be going over goals I've set myself for the year.

Goal #3: Write More

Last year was the Year of Living Write, and a lot of incredible things happened. I presented 2 succesful workshops at the Japan Writers Conference. I was included in a non-fiction anthology which raised funds for earthquake relief. I also had a short story-in-verse selected for inclusion in Tomo, a YA anthology to be released March 10, 2012.

I didn't however, make the progress I'd like in the novel-writing sphere.

Existing novels
Last year, I made it my goal to take a novel through the full pre-query process. Write, re-write, edit, critique, rise, repeat.I didn't get it done, so that mission carries over to this year. Actually, I have two first drafts I want to polish. My last nano MS stars a bipolar MC, and I think that premise has the best hook of all my first drafts, so I want to polish it.

Then there's MS2, my only speculative fiction. You may remember me ranting about how bad it is. Turned out, I'd never actually re-read it. And I did while resting the last nano. The delivery still kind of sucks, but it's got a great premise, and there's like half a plot- about 49.9% more than any of my other stories.

So my mission for the year is to run them both through a couple of drafts.

New novels
I still haven't managed to write a first draft outside of nanowrimo yet. Hopefully, I'll get to that this year. This is a sub-goal, though. I know I'm capable of turning out a first draft, so I'm giving priority to things I haven't been able to do yet.

Conference
Speaking of things I can't do...

In 2010, I lined up a conference in the US. Then I lost my passport, and couldn't go. I swear the minute I cancelled it, I found the passport.

In 2011, I lined up a conference in the UK. I was supposed to leave on March 20th. The great North East Japan earthquake happened March 11. Guess where I live. That's right, North East Japan! When the 20th rolled around, there were still no trains, and we had a gasoline shortage as well. I cancelled my trip and figured I'd leave the seats for people who really needed to get out. Plus I was afraid of not being able to get back.

2012? Third time's a charm?

I'm 90% sure I'm going with a UK conference. The vibe I'm getting is that the US will ask me to fit into their world, and that the UK will love me for being Barbadian. That's an oversimplification, and hopefully I'll get to explain in detail some day.

This conference is also a good reason to have a polished MS ready. In fact, the conference isn't really worth it without a polished MS. I mean, I'm sure I'll get a whole lot of fantastically informative lectures, but I can poke about the internet and find most of that for free. And I can go to the Japan Writers Conference, for under $500 including travel and accomodation. If I go to a conference, it's for the opportunity to make connections, and to get feedback on my work. (The UK conference lets you submit the opening of your novel for critique, and you get a one on one session with 2 agents/book doctors of your choice.)

Submit
By the end of the year, I want to look at submitting a novel-length manuscript. I haven't submitted so far because my work hasn't been ready. But I'm beginning to wonder if my work stays "not ready" so I always have an excuse not to submit it. If I manage to acheive the other points in this post, then I should be able to bring myself up to submission stage. I've been stagnating at the same point of the writing game for way too long.

That's all she wrote! Any writing goals for you guys in the Year of the Sparkle Dragon?

Year of the Sparkle Dragon: Study More

It's the year of the Water Dragon in Chinese philosophy, and I've declared it the Year of the Sparkle Dragon: our year to shine! This whole week, I'm going over my goals for 2012. I've thrown the word resolution out the window, in favour of the more active "goals."


Goal #2: Study More. 

Studying was not on my list of goals for 2011. 2011 was The Year of Living Write, so it was focused on writing. This year my focus is more all-encompassing, because I'm taking over the world - er, that's not right - because I'm drawing to the end of my tenure in Japan.

Japanese
Y'all know I'm a language-aholic. Japanese is the 5th language that I can get by in. I'm sure I don't have to tell you, that it's a doozy of a language. It's got a Subject-object-verb structure ( English is Subjevet-verb-object). It's got particles, which follow words to tell their purpose in a sentence. It's got counters. The way you say "2 chickens" is different from the way you say "2 trees" is different from the way you say "2 cars." There are 3 writing systems. Hurts my head just to think about.

When I first came, I jumped into Japanese with my usual gusto, but I burned out some time last year or late 2k10. Japanese is the language that made ME not want to learn any more languages. (That may change after I get Japanese out of my system. lol)

This year, one of my new neighbours has decided to take the kanji kentei (kanken). Kanji is the Chinese writing system that the Japanese have adopted. You know, the one where one character represents one concept or one word. 木 is tree, 気 is spirit, 黄 is yellow, and 危 is danger. Because I'm crazy, I signed up too. In kanken, I have to know the readings (pronunciation), the meanings and the stroke order (order in which you write the lines of a kanji). That may not sound hard, but all 4 kanji I've used as examples can be pronounced as "ki", and they all have other readings as well. 


We're doing Level 8 (for 3rd graders, 8-9 year olds), but since I'm crazy, I'm tempted to keep going until I've covered all the Joyo kanji (1945 characters). The highest level of kanken tests 6000 characters. 


TEFL
By the first week in February, I have to decide if I'm sticking with this job until next year August, or if I'm done this year. I'm 95% sure I'm staying. That means I'll have 5 years experience in teaching English as a Foreign Language. There's a decent chance that I'll want to come back to this field. After all, it provides opportunities to live in non-English speaking countries. Heaven? Yuppity-yups!

This program accepts a wide range of quals, but many other posts worldwide ask for TEFL qualifications. An opportunity came up to do a course at a discount rate, and I took it.


The 4 other languages
Japanese is killing my other languages. I have not come up with a plan yet, but language is use it or lose it. One of my best friends here was Bolivian (he's since returned to Bolivia) and sometimes I'd be having a convo in Spanish, and a Japanese word would just jump in. Ditto my French conversations. And since I barely knew Italian to start with, I have to dig that from the recesses of my brain. 


It's becoming more and more obvious that I need to make a conscious effort to keep my languages from dying. I haven't come up with a plan as yet, other than the possibility of foreign language blogs, but I will make one this year. 


You may notice that I've only mentioned 3 other languages. The fourth? English! When I was in school, I was a grammar guru. Two years in a US college almost killed me, but I got really good at American grammar as well. Now, I can't remember where commas go, my spelling sucks, and I regularly forget words. This is the year I give in and buy myself a Junior English (the grammar guide practically all primary schools use in the Caribbean) or some other grammar guide.


I won't mention any writing-related studies here. You'll see them tomorrow in the Write More post. How about you guys? Any studyin goald for 2012?

Year of the Sparkle Dragon: Save More

Hello, hello, hello. Since the last time I've been here (yesterday), I've decided it's the year of the Sparkle Dragon. I made a comment about it being the year we sparkle on facebook. And in Chinese astrology, it's the year of the Water Dragon. (Technically, Chinese New Year doesn't start for a while, but Japan does this weird thing of observing Western New Year AND embracing Chinese astrology.) So anyhow, it's the year of the Sparkle Dragon.

The first thing on my list of goals is:

Save More

My financial situation
I make 300,000 yen a month. I can afford to be this open about what I make because everybody on the JET program makes the same money. And if anyone in the world wanted to find out how much that is, all they would need to do is find a Japanese embassy or government website, phone number, official.

How much is 300,000 yen worth? When I first came to Japan, 3 1/2 years ago, 105 yen was a US dollar. Now, the yen is holding fairly firm while everyone else's money drops through the floor (except Australia, it seems). We're up to 79 yen a dollar. (GBP 179 -> 123, CND 90 -> 77, EUR 139 -> 102.) With everything in such a state of flux, it's hard to say what it's "worth". That said, my monthly salary used to be just shy of $3000 US, now it's around $3750. I make almost $1000 more in exchange rate alone.

There is one final consideration to be made when it comes to my salary. The US value may have gone up, but I don't live in the US. I live in Japan. I make my money in yen, and I spend my money in yen. The prices here have remained mostly constant. So if I struggled to have left over money before, I will still struggle to have left over money now. But of course, if I can find something to save, it's worth more. What used to be $100 US, is now $125.

(I keep talking in US because the Barbados dollar is tied to the US, ie, we have a constant exchange rate.)

Shopping
You can only save what you don't spend.  Really every discussion on saving is about spending. Amazingly, lots of people (*waves from the audience*) don't really analyse their spending habits when they try to save. Fail waiting to happen? That's what she said! ;)

I'm pretty bad about impulse buys. But I live in the back-bush of Japan, 600 km out of Tokyo, 300 km away from a really major city. My last in-town shopping spree was at the stationary store! There's not much else to spend random money on. (Let's ignore my $30 "One Piece" pencil sharpener.)

Where I fail (massively) is online. I spend a lot of time online - on the blogosphere, on twitter, in my emails - and it's way easy, with credit card info saved in my brain, to just buy stuff. My biggest issue is books. All of you awesome people write/reccomend awesome books. And it is virtually impossible for me to buy 1 book. Book shipping prices used to deter me, but now that I have a Kindle, and Book Depository for free shipping of non-Kindle titles, I've got nothing to lose but my paycheck.

Late in 2011, I devised a new system: Shopping Cart Fridays. If I find out about a book that I ABSOLUTELY HAAAAAAAAVE TOOOOO REEEEEADDDDD, then I slip it into the Shopping Cart. On Friday, I swoop by the shopping cart (and my Goodreads TBR), decide how many books I can afford and buy them. Why Friday? Because it's my busiest day, so I don't have time to faff around on Amazon, which means I'm less likely to buy random stuff which hasn't been through they Shopping Cart trial.

Travel
In 2009, I was in 9 countries. Even I can't afford that. There was a month where I ate ramen for dinner every day. So not kidding. In 2010, I decided I wasn't going anywhere, for the sake of saving, but still managed to eat through the same amount of money. I guess I switched from bein frugal in Japan, and travelling externally to just traipsing up and down Japan. I'm beginning to get this under control by finally getting over (mostly) the need to be at everything. And by having a semi-budget.

Budget
I can crunch numbers, but I'm not one for living off a sheet of paper. So what I've done, again in the last few months of 2k11, is to think out how much I need, and withdraw that money at the beginning of the month. Then I divvy it up into 4 or 5 weeks. Each Friday, I open up a stack. It's not written in stone, that if I'm out of money early, I can't access more. But the perk of this system is that I can see down to weekly spending if I'm doing well or poorly, and it's easier to adjust than on a monthly system.

End result
I plan to go to a conference this year, which will eat a couple thou. And I plan to go home, for another couple G's. Other than that, I hope to save lots of money. I'll say $125 US, for starters, every month, but I'm really hoping it's more than that. Especially, since this is my last full year at this guaranteed salary.

Sure I'll succeed though. It IS the year of the Sparkle Dragon!