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There are tons of different types of antidepressants as far as I know and some of them just won't work for you, if it's actually doing nothing good for you it's maybe time to try a different one.  There's nothing wrong with you, it's normal for clinically depressed people to have certain medicines that don't work for them.

 

It could be good for you to see a psychiatrist about your depression, but you should tell her to pick a good one :P

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I just got another email from my mom. She's seeing a psychiatrist now, which I guess I should be happy about, but she wants me to see him too and he seems super sketchy. His email is reg7psych at whatever and he has a one-star rating on ratemds.com; having apparently gotten things like patients' ages and even sex wrong.

 

AVOID! That description makes him sound like he shouldn't be practicing, and since your family have tried to nudge you toward anti-gay conditioning in the guise of therapy before, they are not to be trusted. Also, if the sessions are one on one, family members going "Hey let's go to the same shrink!" is seriously fucked up.

 

I am on the verge of quitting with no backup plan and barely a few k in the bank + monthly debt payments.

 

I did this, in a similar situation. Before the jump I made sure I had two clients lined up, and even they were only enough to pay for me and my company to exist for about six months. A few weeks ago, I passed the two year mark. It's been difficult, and at times I either almost gave up or said to myself "If this is as difficult next year, I'm looking for a salaried job". It's got easier as time has gone on, for a few reasons. One is just building my rep and meeting more potential clients. Another is that I almost went bankrupt twice in my first year. The first time it happened, I was depressed and panic-stricken. The second, I was keeping the company running but hadn't been able to pay myself for two months, and oddly it made me feel invincible. I've spoken to others who been in similar situations, or lost companies, and developed the same feelings. One described it as a feeling of being undead. It's like "Ok I've lost that but I'm still alive. I'm going to be able to eat, and the bank are going to have to come and cut my fucking head off if they want to do anything worse to me".

 

Freelancing opens up a whole world of new worries and concerns. I once took on a client that seemed like wankers because I needed the money. I regretted it later, and by the time I was done working with them realised I could have made more money doing other, less stressful stuff over the same time period. Another wanted a small job done, but split up over the course of three months, for £400. Again, I needed the money at the time and had my reservations. Once it was completed, they took about 90 days to pay on 30 day terms. Excuses ranged from "Sorry, the finance department have lost your invoice" to "We need you to split that into about a dozen budget lines". These people are not worth it; beyond the time you agree, clients will occupy your mind, and can destroy your productivity elsewhere. The biggest lesson I've learned is: get to know clients as well as possible, and trust your instincts on them. The clients I've had bad feelings about initially have ended up being the only ones who paid late or asked for freebies later. Chances are, anything that raises a red flag for you at the beginning will propagate through the entire working relationship (I should also specify: My website doesn't have all of the clients I've worked for on it).

 

Other things I've learned: I'm very, very good at not indulging myself with games/TV/sunbathing/etc. As long as I manage to not fritter away time online, I have a solid work ethic, and wouldn't be suited to this otherwise. Also, *never* get the full amount due upfront. A couple of clients paid before the work was done, and I found not having a date in the future to send an invoice dented my motivation to do the work. My standard terms are half on commencement and the other half on completion.

 

If you're willing to actually run a business, you could potentially do okay out of that in web development. My brother did similar after working for big web agencies and meeting a lot of developers who were just as pissed off as him. None of them could be bothered with the admin of actually running a business though, and their gripes at having bosses always overwhelmed their desire to break free. So he runs a small agency that employs those guys to do freelance work on the side: He gets to scale when he needs to, and they get a bit of extra work while being insulated from the client and business related bullshit that entails.

 

Also, since agencies ar typically very good but, there are other types of client out there you won't have met through your existing job. Be careful not to set your prices too low. After speaking to other developers, a web developer I know that had been struggling doubled his, and carried on picking up new clients at the same rate.

Caveats that might relate to your aspirations of mixing art and commerce: My brother had a head full of Smashing Magazine when he first set out, and found that actually, loads of people just want basic zencart shops, etc. In a similar way, photo graduates I've known have been told by their lecturers to not turn their noses up at wedding photography if they want to make a living from their camera, and some stable, freelance game developers I know do about 70% dull contract work to support the time they put into their own commercial projects.

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So I bought a house this weekend.  It's just a dirt lot right now but hopefully over the next few months a brand new house will appear.  I wish I could turn on cheetah speed and move in now.

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Welp, looks like after a week of cooking pizzas I don't have a job again. What is a guy with no skills, no education, and no car to do? Start hoping that Wendy's is hiring.

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Kingz, if you were looking to move you might even be able to convince them to let you work part time and remotely on a contract basis.

 

But yeah, I'd put up money for a Hobo Lobo Kickstarter.

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Man, I have a case of the motherfucking Mondays (I hope I don't get my ass kicked for saying something like that around here *winking smiley*) and drinking all day yesterday certainly didn't help. I just want to be in a deep dark cave somewhere with all my video games, some good WiFi, and a few woodland critters, not at work.

 

Lately I've been really feeling like I need to use a few of my vacation days to just stay home and veg out but I have to save them all for when our baby comes in July. There hasn't been a holiday that I get off since New Year's Day (Memorial Day can't come soon enough) and such a long stretch of this daily grind with no break is starting to make me go crazy. It's bullshit that I only get 3 days of paternity leave and the rest has to come out of my personal leave balance. Ugh, having to use so much vacation for something that is going to be so taxing is depressing. Don't get me wrong, it is going to be a wonderful and rewarding experience but now that I've been through it once I know I won't be getting much sleep, and I need my sleep.

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So I bought a house this weekend.  It's just a dirt lot right now but hopefully over the next few months a brand new house will appear.  I wish I could turn on cheetah speed and move in now.

 

 

...as in you're going to build it from scratch? Or it's just tired and needs refurbing?

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It's new construction, so it's going to be built over the next few months, though not by me personally.  I do plan on dropping by frequently to check on the work.  It's my first house so I'm excited, but it also probably means no new games for a while which bums me out.  I guess it's a good excuse to go through my backlog.

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Ah right. Well, am building one now myself, was going to offer advice if you needed it :) Best of luck! Ours has been a non-stop rollercoaster of things not happening as they should!

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Are you going to include secret passages and stuff?

 

I wish I had the money to make up my own house and let it be built.

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Ah right. Well, am building one now myself, was going to offer advice if you needed it :) Best of luck! Ours has been a non-stop rollercoaster of things not happening as they should!

Thanks!

 

 

 

Are you going to include secret passages and stuff?

 

I wish I had the money to make up my own house and let it be built.

I really REALLY want to do stuff like that, but as it stands right now, no.  I do plan on turning the basement into a man cave, so maybe I can do some crazy stuff down there later.

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My parents' house had secret rooms. My dad built the place, but didn't design it particularly well and included some major redundancies. There was a fairly sizable room hidden behind a bathroom that you could only get to by going through a tiny door in the back of a closet, plus a few others hidden behind similar doors in my parents closet, a short passage that could take you from one room in the basement out the closet of another room (because the back wall of the closet was never built) and an alleged attic behind a cubbyhole that I've never been in. Come to think of it, there would also have to be a significant slice of the house that's completely hollow with no connections to any other rooms.

 

My house was fucking weird is what I'm saying.

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I wish.

 

As much as I'm leaving myself open for a "staying in the closet" joke, in retrospect I actually liked sitting in that first hidden room sometimes. There were a bunch of old toys back there and sometimes I miss my stuffed animals.

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I had a lot of crazy ideas for a house when I was a kid.  My secret passages had secret passages (which had secret compartments).  I wanted to make one room all white with a single light source directly overhead.  The room would have a slight curvature to the walls so that when you sat in the center, it looked like an infinite space.  Every room had a different theme (space, temple, medieval, etc).  I wonder if I still have those blueprints around...

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weird parallels continue cropping up tegan :P my family built the house I grew up in, during construction me and sister saw some unused space behind our upstairs hallway closet and built a secret closet-sized room you could only access through a tiny child-sized hole in the first closet.  This metaphor proved foreshadowy.

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Going to be at least another week or so before I have money again, and I'm pretty much out of food. As of right now I've scraped up all the loose change in the house and still only have a few dollars.  :getmecoat

 

I really hate to ask, but if anyone wants to help me out a little, my Paypal is under teganrobichaud at gmail dot com (it was set up by a family member, so I don't think it displays my name, but it's definitely linked to my bank account. I've been meaning to fix that). I can do a doodle for you or something if you want.

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Ah, the joy of summer as a Ph.D candidate! I've been working my ass off adding about a page per day to this article, but now I need to figure out when to fly home, buy a car, and drive it back, so that I can maybe get my old job at the Medical Center Library back and not drain my savings dry like I did last year. Spend money to make money, eh? To be fair, part of all that was because I was house-sitting for my advisor and then he paid me a fraction of what was expected. Man, that was a barrel of monkeys.

 

Tegan, I plan to give you some money once I buy the car. It'll be the end of May, will that be too late? I don't need anything in return, just keep being my Eva-loving online friend.

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Yesterday I fulfilled a dream that I had for a long time: I went to see (part of) Der Ring des Nibelungen. The performance of Die Walküre was in the Amsterdam Music Theatre and it was indescribable. I went with my dad; the two of us are the only lovers of opera in the family.

 

It's funny, even after being quite intimately familiar with Wagner, I didn't expect this to be fun. I expected it to be impressive, memorable, affecting my appreciation, etc, but also somewhat of an ordeal to sit through. Imagine my surprise as the hours (5 including breaks) swished away, transported on the sights and sounds of pure spectacle. It's a done deal at this point: I HAVE to see the full cycle one day. Sign me up for Bayreuth, I'll gladly wait six years for it.

 

walkure_876x350.jpg

 

The Valkyries wore silver wings and their choreography made them look machinelike and exalted, just like they should be. Their helmets were shaped as skulls.

 

Walk%C3%BCre-DNO-Marco-Borggreve.jpg

 

Wotan is the center of the piece. I never realised until now what a complex character he is; torn between his meaner side, a profound sense of responsibility, the love for his family and the frustration of being chained by the treaties that are the base of his power: "Der durch Verträge ich Herr, den Verträgen bin ich nun Knecht." To see him constantly battling his true desires, making enemies out of every last friend and ally, is devastating.

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Just wanted to give a big thank-you to all the people who helped me out! I just realized that I'm petty sure I owe some people drawings! Just shoot me a PM if you want a thing drawn. I honestly haven't been up for drawing anything for the last few days, but I swear I'll doodle something when I get a chance.

 

Tegan, I plan to give you some money once I buy the car. It'll be the end of May, will that be too late? I don't need anything in return, just keep being my Eva-loving online friend.

 

That's cool, every little bit helps. Thanks in advance!

 

 

 

LIFE THING: yesterday I saw a pheasant. I have never seen a pheasant in an urban area before. He was fighting with his reflection in the window of an abandoned building. He was so distracted that he didn't even notice me, so I got within a few feet of him and watched for a moment.

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I bought a pack of ginger ale sweetened with Stevia, because I am beginning to think I drink too much artificially-sweetened soda.  Stevia is made from a plant that's related to ragweed.  

 

After drinking two can of this soda I have a sore throat and my nose is feeling stuffy.  

 

I wonder if ragweed is one of my hayfever triggers?

 

 

 

(TRIGGER WARNIN'.)

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Lifehacker suggests iced tea if you drink soda for the sweetness because it's similar and you can sweeten it yourself with sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup, or if you do soda for the caffeine, black or green tea.

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