I’ve spent the last few weeks moving in and out of a fairly severe bout of depression and anxiety. So severe, in fact, that despite a horrible history with them, I have decided to try again with one of the few "anti-depressants" that doesn't (in my case) make depression worse. What it does do (and this is why I stopped taking it last time) is cause tremors in my hands which make it nearly impossible to do anything requiring fine motor skills — you know, those skills that I just finally got back after nearly a year of nerve issues in my right shoulder, neck, and arm.
So, when I had finished the blog that I was planning to publish this month (I can mostly type, just with a few more errors than normal -- plus I was editing one of the many drafts I wrote over the last few years of not publishing anything) I sat down to do the doodles and I CAN'T CURRENTLY DRAW. So that post will remain unpublished for a while longer.
Luckily, it wasn't the only unpublished draft.
Among the others was an older version of this post — the first sentence was nearly identical, but at the time when I first wrote it my problem wasn't tremors-as-a-side-effect-of-medication, it was instead "a profound lack of focus which makes it difficult to be creative".
I really wanted to be creative. I was working at an unfulfilling job, and I wanted to feel like I was doing something worthwhile with my time; I hoped that creating something would help me to feel better. I wrote about how I usedto be creative, and how I had flipped through Past Gwendle’s portfolio to get me going, and how I had drawn a new doodle to illustrate some ancient poetry.
The "new" doodle is now a few years old, and it finally gets to be shared with the world! So . . . hurray for hand tremors, I guess.
In my final year of high school, I took a creative writing class, and on one particular day, our instructor thought it was a good idea to give a room full of eighteen-year-olds the delightful assignment of writing some limericks.
After listening to several risqué submissions from my classmates about Chesty Larou, and young men named Eenis, I read the first of my two limericks:
When composing a lim’rick it’s best
not to put your good taste to the test;
if it’s bawdy, or crude, or unspeakably rude,
then it won’t stand apart from the rest.
And then I read the second one:
On a bathroom wall someone once wrote:
“Never have kinky sex in a boat
‘cause canoes tend to tip while you’re trying to strip
and a guy wearing handcuffs won’t float.”
Because I’m an insufferable smart-ass.
