Things are good. Really good right now.
It’s so strange — now that I’m off the Seroquel, I wake up at 7:30 or 8 am, and I can’t fall back asleep. I’m just up. I went from getting nine hours of sleep a night to six. For the first week, that was really rough and I felt tired a lot, but now I’m fairly well-adapted. I like it. I mean, think of how awesome and full my life could be if I had those hours of the day to spend with the rest of society! I’m psyched on the possibilities. Morning activities! WOAH.
The uber-compulsiveness that happened at the start of the switch to the Trileptal is becoming a little less overwhelming — manageable, even — and the only other side effect is some annoying nausea during the day and occasional and minor loss of balance. It’s actually kind of funny — every now and then, perfectly sober, I just kind of topple over a little. I’ve decided I will start acting like it is something cute that I do and then everyone else will believe that too. It’s a feature, not a side effect.
On another note, this is something that happens when you make the transition from dating in your early 20’s to dating in your late 20’s: suddenly, everyone has baggage. He’s been married before and they have a kid. Or he’s never been married before, but he has a kid from a previous relationship. Or he’s been married before, no kids, but then he had a kid with the girl he was seeing right after the divorce (but never married). Or, ya know, he has a kid he ignores in Germany, and some psychopath on Facebook makes damn sure you know about it.
I have never been married. I have no kids. You’d think I’d be a shining beacon of kid-free, first-marriage-eligibility hope for the twenty-eight men in the city who meet the same criteria, but somehow those are not the men I find.
I find the ones with the kids.
There’s a teenage girl I mentor. She recently turned 18, and she started hooking up with a 27-year-old man. (At first she lied to me and said he was 26. “26 sounds a lot less old than 27,” she explained later. Which, as a 27-year-old, was a hard pill to swallow, although I agreed.)
I was ranting to her about how I’ve reached the age where all men have kids or marriages or both and she was like, “Oh, God. Is that what it’s like in your 20s? I’m going to call my guy tonight and ask him if he has any kids. I never even thought of that! Wow, dating people in their 20s is so different.”
You’re tellin’ me, little girl.
