Brain chemistry, books, and breasts…

…a post brought to you by the letter “B”.

First, brain chemistry.

I have weird sleeping habits. I have always had weird sleeping habits. I’m most wide awake about eleven or twelve o’clock at night, and when the sun starts to come up, that’s when I start to crash. My body appears quite fixed on this quixotic schedule; I adapt quit quickly when I travel across time zones, and end up on the same sleeping cycle.

It’s really inconvenient. In fact, in high school, the only way I survived was to sleep in shifts; I’d go to sleep for a few hours right after getting home, wake up about 8 PM, stay up ’til 2 or 3, then go to sleep again for a few hours.

At one point when i was a kid, my parents actually took me to a doctor about it. He claims that while most people can alter their normal sleep/wake cycles just by changing the time that they get up or go to bed, there is a small minority of the human population for whom the Circadian rhythm is simply fixed and won’t budge, and that’s that.

That’s not the interesting bit; that’s just the background. The interesting bit is what happens when you mess with brain chemistry.

See, I have a new doctor. And when I went in to see him for the first time, I talked to him about my weird sleep schedule. And he, being apparently a practical jokester,decided he’d prescribe Ambien to me, to see if it’d sledgehammer my sleep schedule to something a bit more normal.

Folks, Ambien is some seriously scary shit.

A lot of folks have some pretty bizarre side effects. i didn’t get the really strange ones, like sleep amnesia (which is a pity, because I think it’d be fun to play with in a BDSM context–wake up one morning curled up next to my partner, with bruises all over my body and a pile of sex toys scattered around the bed, and with absolutely no memory of what happened until she handed me the videotape…but I digress.)

What I did get was a complete, radical overhaul of my internal perceptions of hunger.

See, for the most part, I’ve never really felt hungry. I mean, sure, if I go for a long time without eating, I’d get all shaky and stuff, and then I’d think “Oh yeah! I haven’t eaten in seven hours. Reckon I might want to see to that.”

But it’s never been intrusive, you know? Like, it’s never been something that I get all “OMG I can’t concentrate if I don’t eat RIGHT NOW.” And for the most part, that’s how I like my biological needs…non-intrusive. I resent them as it is; to have them pressing on me all the time, demanding to be taken care of, would just be awful.

But a week after I started on Ambien, I started waking up at 4 AM starving. I mean, in a very literal sense, hungry like I have never experienced hunger before. I’m talking like “I am so starving that if I don’t eat right this minute NOW DAMMIT NOW I am going to DIE.” For the first time in my entire life, I have an appreciation for what the phrase “hunger pains” actually means.

And I’d try to eat, but couldn’t, because…well, I wasn’t really hungry. It was a strictly internal, brain-chemistry thing.

And it was miserable. So much so that I quit taking the Ambien.

Now, three months later, my sense of hunger is still distorted. I stopped waking up with phantom hunger. Bu my perception of hunger is still much stronger and sharper than it has ever been in my life, and I do not much cotton to that.

Ambien: It’s the reverse of a diet pill! Fucking brain chemistry anyway.


Books!

So I got a big pile of books from Amazon yesterday, with a second big pile of books scheduled to arrive today. And I still have $30 in credit from Amazon.com!

Which, I discovered completely by accident while I was looking for old-school steel manacles to affix to the Monkey Rocker, also sells BDSM gear. When did Amazon start selling BDSM gear, and why wasn’t I notified?

Not only do they sell BDSM gear, they sell straitjackets. Brand-new straitjackets. In black!

For $29.

And I still have $30 in credit.

Let me repeat that, because I know it’s too much awesomeness to sink in all at once. I found a place that sells straitjackets. For twenty-nine dollars. And I have a thirty dollar store credit from this place.

*is blown away by the cool*


And finally:

_luaineach is doing a fundraiser to support breast cancer research.

Specifically, she’s doing a 60-mile walk to raise money for cancer research. And there’s a minimum threshold of pledges she has to reach in order to be able to do the walking part. Which sounds like a feature and not a bug to me, but it’d still be a shame if all the training she’s been doing goes to waste. You can find out more here.