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hey Cyn. Your music sounds really interesting. Can't beat Punk rock for bringing in the variety. 🙂
My boyfriend and I will be facing the consumerist nightmare that is Valentines day with our usual sense of scepticism and irony. A contest to find the most vomit inducing cards and stupid gifts will suffice. Who needs a day to acknowledge the awesomeness of your other half?!
Books are a topic I could go on for years about…I have a monumental collection and many many influential books.
Top three for starters:
Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer. A beautiful story about history, memory and identity set against the backdrop of a young man searching for a village lost in the holocaust to reconnect with his family's past. Highly recommend, and his other book Extremely Loud and Incredibly close. Made me cry in public because it was so breathtaking.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller… Italo Calvino Hard to discribe, stories within stories within stories.
Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake Insane fantasy about a crumbling castle civilisation. Fantasy with lots of savy and no bloody dwarfs or elves or busty maidens. Brilliant.
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess. A classic. Twisted, hard to get in to and if you crack it, the scary thing is you'll have to think like Alex – the most fascinating anti-hero ever.
Also I've just finished reading Snow Crash – Neale Stephenson – Cyberpunk ironic goodness & Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindqvist an unnerving story of the dead coming back to life, but not a horror novel per se. Big focus on grief/life/death and it's meaning. If you've seen or read Let the Right One in you'll love it.
Stress is a huge trigger for me. If I'm anxious I have no hope of sleeping without medication. I also get 'overstimulated' for want of a better word. I'm not stressed but my mind is rushing with thoughts and ideas. I'm wondering if this is a facet of my bipolar though.
I think that despite our best efforts there's still a lot of misunderstanding about mental health in general and in the reality of particular conditions and how they can affect someone.
Incidentally suicide is a fascinating issue. An interesting book, Let Me Go, collects together suicide notes and then goes on to explain what happened to the people who wrote them. It's an amazing insight and also I think that to dismiss it as cowardly is perhaps somewhat reductive.
