lucky

I added a new track from Winnipeg based Inward Eye (Shame). Heard it on the Bear driving home last night and really enjoyed it - they're apparently a Kinks/Clash mashup, which represents like everything great about gritty rock, so fantabulous for them!

***

So last class was our schizophrenia lecture, and to give us an idea of what the disease was like, the prof showed us a 10 minute clip from some 70's instructional DVD of a case study. I've seen a lot of cool disorders, but all of them usually have a really discrete organic cause or a well-studied pathology. Schizophrenia on the other hand is like many psychiatric disorders in that they are all these theories as to what their dysregulation is, but a lot of it is speculation based on retrospective approaches off of drugs that seem to work. What's so weird about it is that under any other circumstances you'd assume this individual was just another one of those strange fellows on the bus who sits strangely, but once he opens his mouth and starts talking, you quickly realize there's something a little off.

This guy starts rambling on about how he was arrested by the police for masturbating in his own bed, and how his brother-in-law put the devil and Lucifer in him. He also claims that when he drinks milk, specifically a quart of it, that he grows cinesthetic horns that disappear without leaving scars. He orates that he can see himself in this parallel universe, where there's all this food and he ate this wonderful magical food and that is how he was born.

Schizophrenia's greatest threat is that it hits young - prodromal stages occur in teenage years and full blown psychosis hits by 21 for men and 27 for women. So I was thinking, how lucky are we to have escaped so many disorders that could have plagued us already, like social anxiety disorder which strikes in the early years or even autism that ravages all social interaction. We have so much to be thankful for, in that we are not necessarily part of the 20% of young adults afflicted with some sort of personality disorder.

The flip side of that coin is kind of frightening though - what diseases await us that we haven't yet experienced? Panic disorder strikes around mid-30s, as does Huntington's chorea - as made famous by 13 on House. Cassius Clay (better known as Muhammed Ali) and Micheal J. Fox both were hit with Parkinson's Disease around the same age, and God knows dementia is waiting for us once we hit 70. Very little separates us from being sociologically abnormal and biologically broken apart from some susceptibility genes and a conducive environment for derangement.

So then I wonder as I'm travelling home impatiently on the 43, maybe we just need to chill out and enjoy life once in a while. We've obviously been blessed with existence, and only God knows how long that will last us, so maybe Rihanna and Numa Numa kid's advice is laced with truth: Live your life. Turn your music up to 18 even though it may irritate everyone around you to listen to Pussycat Dolls' Buttons, purchase a trip for yourself to some random town in Idaho just to get to actually meet a cow named Bessie, eat that last piece of cake and play it off like you don't know who ate it. I'm not saying go be a badass and buy a Harley and spend the rest of your life eating at diners and being no stranger to leather, I'm saying go ahead and buy that puppy even though your parents don't want a dog, because sometimes you really don't need to sweat the small things in life. Priorities matter, but give yourself a break from time to time.

We only live once. Make use of it.