the under-over

Posted on 15 February by Kelsey under Uncategorized

Is it possible to be under- and over-medicated at the same time? Yes. Definitely. Absolutely. I can only draw from personal experience and that of the people that I know. I don’t know the actual percentage of people on various anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medication, mainly because those numbers only exist for the United States and doesn’t take on the rest of the world.

Over-medication is the current damning cry, with the outcry focused mainly on children and the ever-decreasing age at which various mental health problems are diagnosed, such as the incredibility of Bipolar I among children under the age of five. (The ones that parents seek to have diagnosed as sociopaths is an entirely different story and is completely stupid as part of the diagnosis for Anti-Social Personality Disorder is a requirement that the person be an adult.)

There are also the number of people on anti-depressants that are on the wrong ones, or the wrong combinations. This is where the over-medication kicks in, and up pop people who say that SSRIs are the worst thing that has happened to them in their lives and that they’d rather live with the condition that they’re used to rather than chance another go on the magical medical merry-go-round. So they remain under-medicated, while also experiencing over-medication in terms of being on the wrong damn pill.

We treat symptoms, not root causes. There, the big secret why it’s medication + therapy = working baseline, rather than one or the other. In this way, the over- and under-medication of people continues because you throw enough drugs at the problem and the symptoms will go away, but then you get times when the medication stops working and you go up and up on the dosage until you have to augment or switch pills entirely because something’s just not working right.

The insomnia is treated with tranquilizers and the old anti-depressants that don’t really do much else, the inability to get out of bed in the morning is treated by taking Wellbutrin in the morning because one of the side-effects that never goes away is the wakefulness (see previous mention of insomnia, only compounded by this), and then another pill in the evening of a Cipralex/Lexapro because it has a sedating effect. Voila, a magic recipe.

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters

Posted on 27 January by Kelsey under Uncategorized

(or, as I call it: Hansel and Gretel: Surprisingly Literate German Peasants)

There is, as it turns out, a limit to my suspension of disbelief as there is a limit to all things. You hunt witches? Okay, that’s within our fairy tale guidelines. You and your sister have a weirdly intense relationship, again, out of the fact that you only trust each other and your parents “abandoned” you. Okay. We’re all fine on that front. Even with Gretel wearing trousers because, hey, skirts are not good for those stunts.

Apparently my breaking point is at the beginning of the film, wherein whoever Hansel and Gretel had doing their PR certainly did a bang-up job of it, with articles, and posters, and all sorts of snippets of text.

Text. Words. And these are German peasants during a witch craze. Which puts us anywhere from the sixteen-twenties to when the last law in Germany making sorcery punishable was in the late eighteenth century (1775, Anna Schwegelin). (Oh, I’m fine with your anachronistic weaponry that would put you in a modern time period but because I want that fucking crossbow and hey, who cares about repeating weaponry? Not me.) Which means that the average literacy of a group of lower class citizenry? Would not be able to read.

The opening animation, however, was rather delightful with its faux-carvings and bits that looked like they would have been right at home with the Malleus Maleficarum (look at that, I didn’t even have to look it up to spell it right. Note to self: you will never escape Latin class). Jeremy Renner, doing his own stunts, runs up a tree and grabs onto flying broomsticks, and generally gets beat up a lot and looks very attractive doing it. Gemma Arterton was no less badass and certainly had a thing against the noses of idiot men, judging from her hands and teeth.

So: fun movie, lots of blood and gore (like the point when a couple of witches are literally clotheslined into chunks much in the same way the Red Queen in the first Resident Evil film took delight in chopping the rescue team into chunks through the use of lasers) and splatters. Bad parts: the inherent misogyny of “all witches are bad and my sister is the only one I trust and other women exist to fuel maintain” that proliferates Hollywood, as usual.

(There is a law that requires me to consume a certain amount of fairy tale-related material per year, and it shows no signs of slowing down, what with Once Upon a Time being very good to me with Regina and Rumpelstilzchen and Cora. Cora, who is my new fantastic role model and provides more leverage to the whole undercurrent that’s going through fairy tale media these days that all women become evil queens in the end, even the softest-hearted princess.)

forward march.

Posted on 1 January by Kelsey under the immortal wars, winterfire, writing

Happy New Year, according to this Gregorian calendar. Not the Julian one, of course. Which I love. It always felt like a secret calendar and something to keep close and tight when we had Orthodox Christmas on 6 January as a child.

Today is the last day to sign up for Inking It Out on Dreamwidth, which is like a year-round Nano, of which I am sure there are many. I chose this one in particular because there is accountability implicit in its goals, which is helpful to me because if I don’t have a set goal, then I end up far afield in research and writing essays about historical events and general topics of how things work in my various worlds.

So, this year will be The Immortal Wars, in which a necromancer is recruited straight out of juvie to work for the international governing body concerning sorcery; and Winterfire Summerfrost, in which it’s all Faerie, all the time, and the daughter of Janet and Tam Lin gets caught up in the courtly pressures of royal lines of descent and learns that all princesses can become wicked queens in the end.

Pour illuminer notre terre et changer la vie.

Posted on 29 December by Kelsey under Uncategorized

It’s funny. Today is the first time that I have ever heard the song ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’, and yet it is still something that I’ve been aware of for several months (see also: that airplanes/shooting stars song, Call Me Maybe, etc.) because of the collective cultural osmosis process that is tumblr.

My general cultural IQ (pop culture, not culture culture. Anthropology degree, remember?) seems to bottom out somewhere in the late nineties. Generally, songs of the last few years are something that I know about because they’re on Glee, which is also not something that I’m engaged in. It’s more of a surface gleaning. I sit atop of the pond of pop culture: music edition and scrape away the lily pads and bubbles that float to the top and the sound they contain within.

However, give me something like an opera or a musical and I will, inevitably, end up knowing every part. A one-woman Sweeney Todd, that’s me. Which leads us, in a circular pattern, to the depths of my childhood, in which the music definitely stopped somewhere in the middle of the eighties and everything was Bowie and Sondheim and various Cameron Mackintosh-produced musicals.

Les Misérables, you needed less close ups of faces, more of the barricade boys (ENJOLRAS), could definitely have done better than Russell Crowe as Javert because those re-arrangements of the score did not benefit anyone, had a delightful Marius in Eddie Redmayne, needed to pull the Thénardiers down a notch or two (but there really wasn’t expecting anything else because, hi, Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter?), had an absolutely gorgeous segue of the revolutionary scenes (I mean, REALLY. You did the funeral the exact same way it happened in real-life. P.S. there’s a Sephora about a block away from where your barricade was now, Enjolras), had HADLEY for about two seconds (y u no bring Ramin, darling?), and did I mention hiring people actually capable of singing properly?

It’s okay. I’ll wait for the DVD and then watch only the French version, like I do with the Phantom of the Opera DVD. It’s better this way. Everything is nicer. And, besides, your Look Down? COULD NEVER top Donnez, Donnez, although I don’t know if it will be called Donnez, Donnez or if it’s going to be Bonjour, Paris like in the 91 Parisian Revival. And, well, À la Volonté du Peuple is just perfection.

Posted on 16 December by Kelsey under links, television, winterfire, writing

I have been quite remiss in my blogging lately. It seems that with Nanowrimo over, I have a lack of things to say. Which isn’t really true, but it’s been one of those stretches of time where I have images in my head that can’t be put down into words. Lots of research. I’ve been caught up in the royal houses of Europe, particularly with the years of the False Dmitris in Russia, and fiddling around with various known occult historical figures to dovetail them into the semi-Fringe, but leaning more toward fantasy organization that features within the scenes dancing in my head under the general title of The Immortal Wars.

I’ve also been spending time, awed, at the Replica Prop Forum, drawn there initially by people making reproductions of The Nine Gates to the Kingdom of Shadows (best exemplified here), and the desire to be able to make my own books is creeping up on me again. I find props helpful. It’s why I like research and one of my big things for figuring out characters is figuring out their family history (whether that’s a family tree, like it is for The Immortal Wars, thank you Tasya Bessmertnyeva; or figuring out the Linnean classification of various faeries for Winterfrost Summerfire).

I also re-watched the entirely of Alias, which is, if nothing else, definitely a prop-driven show. Oh, Rambaldi macguffins. Right now I’m quite obsessed with 666 Park Avenue (the television series. Not the book which, most emphatically, was not what I was expecting and turned out to be basically a woman vs. mother-in-law conflict, just with witches with overtones of non-consensual relationships because ~witches are drawn to each other and have feelings for each other no matter what~), and Terry O’Quinn is fabulous as our Devil expy and god damn, but that Alexander McQueen dress that Jane Van Veen wore in the premiere episode is something that I would gladly sell my soul for. After all, my student loans are paid off and the government no longer owns that portion. Hear that, fashion devils?

Right now, I’m working on a Christmas/New Year’s novella. Not so much holiday-themed as with a backdrop of the glitterati of ~~an expy of the Royal York Hotel~~ the Grace Court Hotel and the family that owns it, the prodigal daughter of which is Maggie Grace, returned home from the holidays and confused by the phrase that “There must always be a Grace at court.”

Winter

Posted on 9 December by Kelsey under Uncategorized

Winter lives deep within the marrow of my bones. I almost died in the Black Forest when I was an infant of the cold — blue lips and shivering, near hypothermia. It found its way into me then, and every season since, I can feel it wrapping around my limbs, cold and driving and painful. It keeps me awake, it clenches my jaw, and it makes my head ache.

It makes my chest ache and I don’t know if it’s just the ribs that are doing that.

Posted on 6 December by Kelsey under Uncategorized

Loki now has an army more befitting of his temperature.

Good Golly, Miss Molly.

Posted on 28 November by Kelsey under Uncategorized

The majority of this post is being a cut because of its nature. Cold Days was released a little less than twenty-four hours and thus, spoilers are behind this cut for the latest volume of The Dresden Files.