-F.A. -(from Apocalypse Effexor: Redux Diary page…therefore unedited! )…not usually.  But Effexor-wise, this is kind of how I feel about my week without Effexor, and its end in a plant-derived, dopamine raising substance that wasn’t paid for by the government, as the Effexor tablets, that would cost about $400 a month are.  I made a “mistake”, more an accident, by destroying my supply of Effexor for the week.  Then I tried something I basically knew would be impossible – of course with some hope in mind that this would magically be the end of popping three very large red gelcaps every morning to keep my head together, just as I have that spark of hope each time I walk into the office of a new psychopharmacologist (let’s call them what they are) that usually leads me on for a few hour-long appointment, about helping me get off this drug, but soon grows annoyed at talking about life and tries to convince me that I can achieve this goal by taking a new handful of gelcaps or packed pills or the ones you can peel a layer off of…just like Anne says – blue, yellow, green; “I’ve become quite the addict” – to to learn how much of an addict they made me, to learn how deep Effexor is in control of my brain.  I sure got my answer.  I was expecting it would be sickening, and expected the second after second after half-second brainzaps and light-sensitivity and walking into doorways I got this morning, when I finally got off the couch, the brown couch , wanting desperately to get something done – Indian Summer, the smell of sweet decay in the air and smoke lingering from bonfires from the night before, all the while feeling heat on your October-skin.  Zap zap zapzapzap zap zapzap zap, as I sat on the toilet, light on like nails on a chalkboard in my brain.  MUST.  DO.  SOMETHING. I cannot lie on that couch, nor can I vacuum and hide pills for some night-terror induced reason involving relatives I haven’t seen since I was a small child (indeed, red alert, in the Ashcroft-model sense), for a sixth day.  Well, the first two were not so bad, although I do have a very difficult time remembering them, interacting with people?  It doesn’t seem reasonable after the past days of constant nausea and terror/sleep.  The horror of Apocalypse Effexor is making it difficult to enjoy any kind of “relief”, whether it be from zaps (other symptoms still present – read the pamphlet, I’m in Effexorlessness) or lack of energy.  Well, that’s not really true – I remembered and discovered some really interesting things about brains on music and my own – playing all evening would have been wonderful but I have to keep in mind the possibility that figuring out how to access that skill I was starting to master might not always be pretty and enjoyed by my roommates, who have put up with my couch-ridden delirium for the past three days.  I didn’t want to have to inflict myself upon others 24/7 again in my short life, but that was, financially-speaking, a complete pipe-dream, at age almost-26, living in Vancouver, where rent in the “ghetto” is now almost as high as rent in the West End.  The odd much bigger pipe loft thrown in there, millions upon millions, the rest of us.  Who do not perform “perfectly”, who show emotion, who have vices, who feel really damn lazy sometimes, who feel the pleasure and the deep pain of being strapped to this body.  So, an experiment, and the results yielded were interesting.  They bring tears of terror to think about, but they were very interesting and revealing of what I am facing here.  There has to be a doctor out there willing to help people get off this poison without the pain that we, uneducated consumers socializaed from birth, very literally – is it not a doctor we look in the eyes before those of our mothers’, no? – to take his (for those of us that were searching for “father figures”, men and women/and her orders and prescriptions strictly – finish all of these antibiotics, take two pills every six hours, one in the morning and one and a half at night.  Are these to be our fathers?  Washed down at the demanded time.  Mornings are long.  Hours are longer.  Tears without water, cutting scenes out of paper for dear life, running around the building and collecting power cords from the old apartment now – I am thankful to be freed of our – it was mine the whole time, my little mess, intentions good, nature uncontrollable, the pain of now not being sure if he thought I was malingering around his only intellectual equal on the planet!’s survey contemporary theory class.  No, life has been painful, I would not seek (the tears have turned towards a belly full of silent laughter) to pretend to make it more so, so much that doctors had to dig through my guts.  Heads need shaking.  Some stream of consiousness, good girl, mention Ophelia, gossamer in water, I picture green with pink embroidery, personally.  Mistakes paid forward.  All meant in ‘good faith’.  This is my body and my mind and I shall do with it what I wish and I’m sorry if you have a problem with that but your status does not trump my right to stop taking my Flinstone’s Vitamins for a short while to see if I can live without hoping I’ll get a red one.  Red mistake.  I will dust myself off good and proper on Monday, I will be over homesickness for a place I hoped would exist before I got here but never did, after an hour or so the tears will never be wet and I can not sleep through an appointment – why is there always an appointment – some obligatory time sacfricied for “the man” – more tears turn to belly laughs, no sounds of sobbing from my eyes or my guts – literally – reading over your credit card bill twice and figuring a way to pay it and the psychological aftermath of economic instability – the fallout.  I don’t think I’ll open my Simon Fraser University inbox ever again, and I should have done so a month ago.  I do not care.  I do not care if a professor is going to take the words of a white, blue-eyed, Texan businessman who employs underage women and exploits the sacred tradition of Shamanism and sells it as drug-induced psychotherapy to wealthy westerners, charging them a fortune that seems like a good deal to North Americans and Australians, white haired, blue-eyed, to look into the beautiful dark eyes filled with anxiety at fetching you the right drink even though she has no clue what you are saying, whose pubescent buttocks are seen for a few seconds as she hurriedly goes inside to the bar to decipher these foreign requests for ice and liquor and coca leaves – something with coca leaves because they’re not legal in the ex-pat’s home and native land – over the word of a young, feminist scholar who is known for radically exposing the truth, no matter how sick it is, and in addition, never done a qualitative project where such raw research, if it must be ethnographic, gets the “publishable” stamp without a chart of outdated subculture theory and consists mainly on argot and hierarchies – so it’s okay to talk about “tramp stamps” in L.A. – if one of the participants in that project contacted the professor of the same class she was subject to participating in a qualitative study – M.A., maybe Ph.D., lumped together, same thing, different stage of cash grab – a young woman and gang member who called out the researcher for calling her a “hood rat” because her stamp was not on her lower back but across her neck – falsified data, the need for another member of this category later to be charted, made public, created…social change??   – In this scenario, which could have happened – who would be believed?  The woman with “publishable” data that is already out there but used different terminology, and comes to class, every class, on time and wearing much perfectly applied make-up – no dark circles – asks questions that threw us off, and my temperature rose as I left the “hot seat” and realized she had mixed me up with big words but I had a perfect defense…but I was not fast enough and she looked so utterly “professional” in a suit at times, something I will never adorn…, or the straggler who unearthed an illegal business that is likely common to certain cities/towns in the Amazon where “culture” can be experienced by the slightly off the traveled off-road, maybe adorning dreads or a dirty pair of runners and muddy socks – corruption of the highest degree in the name of tourism – government grants, I bet, for Americans to bring a taste of cannibalism to a new place, wow, true Freudian slip, I meant to write capitalism and am actually quite shaken.  Whoa.  Tourism in Peru, G.D.P, money, hands.  Academic dishonesty!  Holy crap what has it come to…

SSHRC out of undergrad drop-out.  Statistical anomaly as usual.  Graduate student taking electives and classes in different departments and making the bureaucracy difficult to navigate – I guess this was easier for students when you were in my shoes?  Do you not know that you have to do your job without picking a young woman to act as a scapegoat, drawing attention away from the internal discord, the external review, students like me who paid attention and agreed and spoke out about it.  Made it loudly known that even when quiet, our peer-group is completely in agreement and feels like they were ripped off.  Well, if it weren’t for one’s fabulous scholar of a supervisor, providing that they do not retire and move four hours away from campus halfway through your degree, which you have been progressing on more than most students, collecting material for over a year while they have yet to start – not because you want a good grade or a publication but because you care and want to help people, want to practice sociology in its context of revealing social insanity and exposing it – and in addition, choosing to attend Simon Fraser because this would-have-been supervisor, who will always remain a soft of mystery, her softspoken voice supposedly that of a former “hell-cat”, though I noticed no difference between her expression when I arrived, all decorated in gold and promise, bells coming later to make noise, and her expression when I left in tears that were obviously attached to suppressed sobs, after reading the e-mail where I explained the incredibly difficult reasons why Simon Fraser University had violated my rights as a student five times over, added stress to my life that had a great impact on my health, and I had to leave this place she had promised me to be right, just for me!, it is pretty in the summer, because I would be ashamed to give them any more money in tuition and fees, never mind hold a degree from the place, not caring whether or not it would be “tarnished” by the good ol’ boys team – stir up some media attention on their sparkling “ethics” abilities to spot a young woman criminally revealing possibly “made-up” information about the exploitation of Peruvian women for an expendable methods class – what, the fourth advanced methods class I’ve taken?  I think I understand now, sir!