Monthly Archives: September 2005

I may get less angst ridden soon. My antidepressant prescription was refilled tonight. I’ve been on Wellbutrin for six months, and it’s been the miracle drug. It’s like having the walls and the tunnel vision of depression smashed open. It gave me the motivation and the hope to live my life this summer. Without it, I cannot be all I’m capable of: since going on it, I have simply become better at my job, at my volunteer work, in my life.

When there was a doubt that my new insurance, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, might not cover it, I almost lost it. I can’t afford the $150 tab a month to stay sane, and I didn’t have enough medication left to cover a waiting period while I got my doctor to write a generic prescription that I could have filled at a discount Internet pharmacy. So when I missed pills on Saturday and Monday, I decided to let the half life go, and went off it this week. And today, when the drug finally ran out of my system, I started to get sick – hopeless, miserable, and with a headache to kill.

Even I can’t muster Zen in the face of hardcore antidepressant withdrawal.

But it was approved today, and now I’m back on it, and I’m going to be jittery this weekend while I readjust, but I have my brain wiring back to what it should be. I look at the drugs, now, not so much as a sign of weakness that I’m not trying hard enough to adjust my brain chemistry, but as a way to re-wire my brain into what it should be. The Wellbutrin is how I get my brain to work properly enough to channel my spirit into the world. And without it, I don’t think I could run my life at the 110% that I like to run it at (two jobs, kickball, Code Pink, parties, friends, etc)

Blue Cross/Blue Shield, by the way? Bastards. I had to wait a week to get them to talk to my doctor, and then process the request. One more thing to deal with, how I’ll get the drugs I need to function if this ever happens again…but for now, I have a move to go through with, and a surf shaque to occupy, and finding out a backup source of medication will have to wait until next week.

No, your computer display is not set to “pink”:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jilliant/sets/1033997/

But I am very proud to be associated with this group:
http://www.codepinkalert.org/article.php?id=500

(I’m sure there’s a whole blog entry coming on women-only groups I have associated myself with, and the parallels and differences between a group like Girl Guides of Canada and Code Pink, but it’s still forming in my brain)

And here’s the Daily Show coverage of Saturday!
http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/media_player/play.jhtml?itemId=23470

I love seeing Jon Stewart make fun of A.N.S.W.E.R., for not sticking to one issue.

(Author’s Note: This is yesterday’s entry, written on the plane from ATL to LAX)

I came through Atlanta this morning, on a plane change with Delta. It could have been O’Hare, it could have been any of the half dozen American airports I’ve bounced through while traveling cross country. I wished I could go outside and step on Georgia soil, but didn’t have time. I want to see the rest of this country, but this is not the time for it.

I was halfway through the concourse before I realized that my “STOP THE NEXT WAR NOW” T-shirt, which I’d worn as a badge of participation in DC, wasn’t quite the thing to wear in Atlanta. No one said anything to me, but no one said they supported the anti-war movement either. I wish there were more reactions in this country. I feel like if people were more reactive then we would be able to display the energy to stop this administration’s most destructive policies, war or otherwise. I would rather have been stopped in Atlanta, hissed at, glared at, cursed, than simply slide through unnoticed. I don’t think everyone can miss a five-ten girl in a Code Pink t-shirt, and I really don’t think that they can ignore the issue that the t-shirt – and that my presence in Atlanta by way of DC represents.

I don’t understand how the war goes unnoticed in America, and that’s why I went to DC this weekend to protest it I went because I wanted to be one more person at a rally and march that needed the bodies to get the attention. I went to scream, “wake up!” I went because I wanted to say to my country, “there are this many of us that believe, with all our hearts and minds, that this is wrong.” And everyone else who votes in this land needs to think about why we’re saying that.

Saturday was an incredible experience. I don’t think I’ve ever been anyplace with that many people all at once. Not that there was when Code Pink showed up, in full force, at 9AM to set up our stage and hand out our pink slips. The ten of us who left from the house in Takoma Park we were staying at all sat on the train together, and sang one of the songs that the girls had written for the march:

why why Mr President why? you didn’t fix the levees now the water’s too high, spending all our cash on a war that’s a lie…you don’t care if poor people die…

I’ll be back at LAX seventy-one hours after I left.

Here are some clips of the reason I came out here!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/24/AR2005092401701_2.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2005/09/24/VI2005092401545.html
http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2005/09/25/anti_iraqwar_20050925.html

In my time in DC, I have:

I’m in Washington DC! It’s humid as hell out! Hooray for silicone hair product, or my Jewfro would be in full force!

It’s CRAZY here though. I’m in a house in the suburb of Takoma Park. There are forty, fifty women here from ALL OVER AMERICA. Women introduced themselves from L.A., from San Francisco, from Atlanta, North Carolina and DC. There are women here from Chicago and Portland. It’s fantastic.

I, of course, am blogging for Code Pink at our website at:
http://www.codepinkalert.org

Which is what I should be doing now, updating the Code Pink site with my blog and today’s photos. But here’s what I wrote for the CODEPINK site while I was on the plane:

Continue reading →

Thank you, ND, for providing a witty quote:

[09:50] chastise all monsters: i think god was mad at trent reznor
[09:51] chastise all monsters: he finally heard that Heresy song and was like “HEY”

Last night, I got to the airport forty five minutes before my flight left. I didn’t count on the fact that I had to check bags though. And thanks to security laws, my bags have to be on the same flights as me. So if it’s too late to check bags – especially the kind that are as big as I am and have the contents of the CODEPINK store in them – then it’s too late to get on the plane. And I was so used to jumping on my Alaska flights twenty minutes before departure, with only my backpack, that it never occurred to me I’d miss the cutoff for a Delta flight with my luggage.

And now, I still get to go to Washington. And more than that, I had my faith in people restored, that it’s still possible for one really nice customer service agent to change things completely for a traveler. Many of them are too constricted by stupid rules and wouldn’t have even tried to help me. If Delta survives bankruptcy, they’ll do it by giving all their agents the calm ability of that one woman who got me on my flight today. I’m going to DC today, and I’ve been very lucky about it.