Monthly Archive for January, 2007

i haven’t left the house in two and a half days.

this behavior is typical of me on occasion, but this time it’s not me, it’s the weather. here in austin we’re having all kinds of rain and freezing rain and snow and sleet — the kind that makes schools and jobs and overpasses close, the kind that makes your dog slide down the sidewalk when you take her outside. this morning a coworker emailed me and asked if i was bored yet. “no way,” i wrote back. “i’m very, very happy. i’m going to sew!”

and i did sew. i’ve made two shirts, fixed a sweater and a pair of pants, and made two freezer-paper stencils, in addition to all the jewelry i’ve made. while it’s true that i have enough indoor hobbies to sustain me for weeks, i was a little surprised i didn’t go stir-crazy. you see, i’ve gone off my anti-depressants.

i’ve been taking anti-depressants for almost ten years. for the last five of those i’ve been taking effexor, a drug with some well-documented side effects. in low doses it didn’t work, in high doses it made me feel numb, and failure to take any of those dosages by noon on any given day would ruin that day completely. if i was at home i’d have to spend the rest of the day on the couch. if i was at work i’d barely be able to pretend to function. i was dizzy and light-headed and irritable; once i almost passed out in the lobby of my office building. i know that most anti-depressants can give one withdrawal symptoms, and i used to feel funny if i didn’t take my zoloft after a few days, but withdrawals after four hours? come on. a few missed-pill days made it seem like the pills weren’t worth taking at all, especially since i wasn’t sure they worked anymore.

mentally, i went off my medication because i wanted to see what it would be like. everything i’d read told me it would be really hard to wean myself off effexor, and it was hard. i took myself down from two pills a day to one pretty easily, but from one pill to zero was downright dizzying. every day felt like a missed-pill day times two. i was tired and listless and angry and it was all i could do to hide it from my friends and coworkers. when i got down to my last effexor capsule, i broke it open and poured all the little grains into an old plastic sauce cup from the restaurant. whenever i felt withdrawals, i’d open the cup, wet my finger, and press a few little grains onto my tongue. every time i did it i pictured my drug neighbor wiping a leftover dusting of coke onto his gums.

i’d taken effexor for so long i’d forgotten what it was like to be off. would i be giddy and weird? angry and sad? lifeless and unproductive? it turns out i am none of these things. i feel, in a word, normal. i’m no more depressed than i was before, and if anything, i’m more productive. when i come home from work i’m less inclined to spend the rest of the evening curled up in a ball in front of the television. the tv’s still on, sure, but i’m almost always doing something at the same time.

maybe the pills were part of the problem. i still don’t like my job, and i still don’t like where i live, but without the anti-depressants i feel like i can handle those things. funny, i used to say the exact opposite. anyway, i’m glad i did it. human brain chemistry may be as fragile as a melting icicle, but if i continue to treat my mental state as fragile, i’ll never get anything done.

the other night i went to b scene at the blanton museum with a few friends.  b scene is this once-a-month event where they keep the museum open late and have music and serve alcohol.  i was excited about the beer-and-art prospect until i noticed that they wouldn’t let you take any drinks into the art rooms.  but i suppose the rule makes sense.  what if you noticed a shocking painting and did a spit-take?  beer and spit are not good for art; that’s one of the first things they teach you in art history class.

so we drank our beer and then went upstairs.  i was an art history minor at UH, and i quite like art museums.  when i notice a familiar painting from afar, i like to play this game where i try to figure out who the artist is before i look at the card.  if i’m right about the artist, i win!  it’s a game i usually play in my head; playing it out loud might make me look pretentious.

i guess i must have been feeling pretentious that evening, because when i saw a familiar painting (not that one, but one just like it), i turned to my friend mando and said, “ooh!  i bet that’s adolph gottlieb.”  we went closer to look at the card, and i was right!  it was adolph gottlieb.  “i was right!” i said to mando.  “it was adolph gottlieb.”  i explained about the game and we had a good laugh.

a group of people on a nearby bench must have overheard me, because one of them said, “so you know who that artist is?”

“oh!,” i said, surprised.  “yeah, i’ve heard of him.”

“do you know a lot about art?” the same guy asked.

“a little.  i was an art history minor, but that was awhile ago.”  i explained about the game.

“what do you think the painting means?” he asked me.

i began to get nervous.  i didn’t want to be one of those people, the ones who try to act like they know more about art than they really do.  “well, adolph gottlieb was an abstract expressionist, and they dealt in the subconscious quite a bit.  truthfully, i have no idea what it means.”

another person on the bench spoke up.  “maybe the top part is the abstract, and the bottom part is the expressionism,” he said.

“that’s awesome,” i said, laughing.  “i like it.”

“what do you think the artist meant when he painted it?” the first guy said.

“that’s hard to say,” i said.  “but artistic intent is often separate from viewer interpretation.  sometimes people get more out of a work of art than what the artist intended, you know?  and sometimes they get less.  i’ve been to a lot of art museums with different people, and with some of the abstract expressionist stuff a lot of people say things like, ‘why is that in an art museum?  i could have painted that myself.’”

“so how do they decide what to put in art museums, then?  how do they decide what’s good?”  the second guy said.

“here’s the thing,” i said, my nervousness going away, “when people say ‘i could have painted that myself,’ i think about this: a) you didn’t, b) you couldn’t do it now because that artist did it first, and c) when the artist made that work, he or she had something specific and original to say with it.  barnett newman made these paintings that were just a single line of paint down a canvas.  he used masking tape to get the line straight and keep the paint where he wanted it, and that was pretty much all he did.  but he did it because he thought that the single straight line was primitive man’s first form of communication, like taking a stick and drawing a line in the sand.”

“that’s pretty cool,” said the first guy.

“it is, isn’t it?  that’s why those paintings are in art museums.  and here’s the other thing.”  i was really on a roll now.  “pretty much all of these artists who are famous for painting dots and lines and squiggles know how to paint in the classical sense.  i took this painting class once, and i told my teacher i wanted to paint like a surrealist.  she said that all the surrealists, before they painted anything surreal, had to learn how to paint for real first, and that it was important to learn the rules before you could subvert them.  and i think that’s probably true of all these guys.  most people who say, ‘i could have painted that,’ can’t say that about themselves.”

“that makes sense,” said the second guy.

“hey, thanks for talking to us,” the first guy said.  “we appreciate it.”

“oh, no problem,” i said.  “i usually play that game by myself because i don’t want to sound too pretentious, but this was a lot of fun.  thank you.”

as i walked away it was all i could do to keep myself from skipping.  talking about art for the first time in forever felt good, like stretching muscles i’d forgotten i had in the first place.