I guess it's just a case of being 34 and 11/12ths, but I woke up this morning with unbelievable back pain from the two straight days of intense hoops. I used to play three and four days in a row in Chapel Hill, but I was in excellent condition then, not to mention merely 30 years old. This is sucky. I obviously need to start behaving nicely towards my body if I expect it to last until the middle of the century or so.
Not that anyone cares, but my 3-month long odyssey of getting the second phone line installed finally came to fruition this evening. I had to string phone cord through a wall, across the ceiling of a giant room, around four corners and into the back of the apartment. In all, 108 feet of wire, and for some reason, it hadn't worked for weeks. Finally, I replaced a nondescript length of cord and the line sprang to life. Half of me wanted to celebrate, the other half wanted to throw the phone out into the fucking street.
Which reminds me: one night in about 1992, during one of the particularly low biorhythms of the Purple House (which was known for several), Matt and Clay were watching MTV downstairs. About seven bad videos in a row came on, and Matt said that if the next song sucked, he was going to destroy the VCR. Of course, Mariah Carey or some such shit came on, and Matt yanked the VCR out of the wall, took it outside, walked to the middle of McCauley Street, and throttled it on the pavement until there was a crater of electronic parts spread about fifty feet around. He spoke for all of us that night, and got a huge gash on his forearm that bled for days. What was really funny is that it was Clay's VCR.
The Celextant, May 7, 2002
There was a report today that stated what I'd already known since a similar study was done on St. John's Wort: the placebo often works as well or better – than a major anti-depressant. Boy, I believe it, too. What is interesting to me, however, is how long a placebo keeps working. Dr. Gorman intimated that the placebo rates were high for SSRI's, but that they didn't work on the long term.
Regardless, the whole thing causes me to wonder: how much of my little observations here are complete horseshit? It seems unlikely that all of "better feelings" are due to simple psychology, if only because I often forget I'm even taking a pill. Can the placebo effect work on you if you don't really know you're taking it?
Posted by at May 7, 2002 10:47 PM