| 27 dec 2001 dude. russell crowe is amazing. i met up with jay and margaret last night to watch _a beautiful mind_. even though i'm technically inclined, i wondered about how interesting a mathmatician's biography would be. judging from the ads, i thought there would be some geek thrills that came along with code breaking, but that didn't play so prominently in the movie. but still, the movie touched me. because it deals with a person and his madness. crowe's character, real-life mathmatician john nash, jr., has schizophrenia, which makes him delusional and paranoid. and while i was watching it, i equated what i have (TS) to what afflicted him so much. my little theory is that TS is like a smaller version of something as full-blown as schizophrenia. so i feel a kinship with people who suffer from that disorder. i mean, we both take medications that slow the brain down, like haldol, and when crowe's character sat there and said that the medication prevented him from fully using his brain to solve math problems, i understood exactly what he meant... haldol makes the brain kind of fuzzy, unable to concentrate, kind of restless... something that i've been going through this entire year of 2001...this haldol haze. but what really touched me was watching his personal relationship with his wife suffer. when you are with someone who has a mental disorder, you want to help them to the best of your ability, but you also have to realize that these demons can't be stopped by you or anyone else... they're permanent defects in the person's brain. and watching jennifer connelly's character of alicia nash grow more and more frustrated and helpless... that really made me sad. the man she fell in love with was overtaken by the shadow of delusion and fear to the point where she had to trick herself into loving him by imagining what he used to be like... and that kind of situation, where you really don't love the person as is, but as the way he used to be... that's just really gut-wrenchingly sad.. watching alicia's face and reaction really reminded me of k2's attitude towards me back when my TS was more severe... i know she loved me, and she wanted to help, but there comes a certain point where there's nothing she or i could do... i just had to live with the tics, and as much as that sucked, there was no other way. i mean, i desperately tried more and more different kinds of medications (this was before i found haldol), but none of them worked. and during the horrible times when i had my nervous TS breakdowns, she would come over and take care of me... as much as she loved going out and doing stuff, k2 would just read and cook and watch tv while i lay in bed, cursing what life had given me and finding my only comfort in sleep. and i would hate myself for not being able to be normal (in any sense of the word) and not being able to return the affection or devotion that she had or do what she wanted to do. it was that one-sidedness that i abhored, yet i couldn't do anything about it because my life had been smothered in fighting my own selfish problems. and for that reason above all else, that is why i loved k2... because she's the only person who has seen me through my worst times, and she stood by me and made sacrifices throughout. i know that eventually, my TS and my related anti-social tendencies had a strong hand in our eventual breakup, but k2 did the best she could, and even i am surprised at the fact that she handled it as well as she had... i applaud her patience and the capacity of her heart. but yeah. my madness is something i have to live with. now, it seems the real-life john nash has been able to recover from his problems. when asked about his "madness," he is quoted as saying, "without his 'madness,' zarathustra would necessarily have been only another of the millions of billions of human individuals who have lived and then been forgotten." yes, being crazy may be a curse, but often it gives us gifts. it may be that without his remarkable hyperactive brain, john nash would have never come up with his brilliant conclusions about game theory. and i know that TS has given me some gifts as well, except that i rarely use those gifts these days, so the benefits aren't quite as stark. but anyways... i do know that without my madness, most of the quintessential achievements of my life would probably have never happened... yes, maybe i'd have other quintessential moments in a life without TS, but i bet that they'd be entirely different from the stuff that i've been able to pull off. so i do feel blessed, although these days, with the slowly increasing onset of my tics, i'm starting to curse my life again. it's always a cycle. ----- shit. it seems my tahoe trip has fallen through. it's our fault entirely for not booking a place months in advance. alan was calling places, and he found one place for $180 a night, but with just three of us going up, we didn't know if peter would be willing to pay that much for three nights worth. because in addition to the room, the snowmobiling and the skiing would cost a decent amount, too. i didn't really care because with my new job, it'll be awhile before i take another vacation. but peter's a bit more frugal, we thought. shit. so i have to find new plans for new year's. it would have been fun to hang out with alan and peter in tahoe... load up on vodka and feel warm and dizzy. and i was really looking forward to getting some good pics of us snowmobiling. oh well. stanford's playing georgia tech in the seattle bowl right now. it sucks that they scheduled bowl games on a THURSDAY in the afternoon... what the hell? it's not like anybody can watch it. i finally got my phone installed in my cube. the guy came in this morning, and i thought he was pretty rude, because he just plopped the phone on my stack of papers, plugged it in, and left without even checking if the phone worked. i picked up... no dial tone. grrrreaaat. since then, he's come in like four more times, fucking with the phone a bit and leaving each time. but now it finally works. i don't think i'm going to even bother giving out my work number, though... i don't want to deal with learning how to use yet another voice mail system. *sigh* i'm bummed about tahoe. i would have liked to spend the entire weekend with people. especially since jay is leaving tomorrow for bermuda, and i'll be stuck at our place by myself for the weekend. fuck. |