So it's been a year. How am I?

(from left to right) Me as I appear now; me as I appeared one year ago. 

"So how have you been?"

Every Wednesday afternoon at around 3:59, I pull into the parking lot of the Arlington Professional Center, an uninspiring complex of squat brown office buildings, in my battered, decade-old silver Cavalier and walk to Suite J for my weekly therapy session. I try not to arrive even a minute early, because I want to spend as little time as possible in the waiting room. Suite J of the Arlington Professional Center has the worst waiting room in the history of people waiting in rooms. Auschwitz had nicer waiting rooms than this place. It is a cramped and ugly space which, if anything, would deepen a patient's sense of hopelessness. There's a faded poster of a wolf on one wall and a table piled high with useless, glossy, oversized magazines filled with pictures of expensive furniture. Certainly, the room's oddest touch is a shelf with a hopelessly outdated and never-used boombox, along with a stack of never-played CDs (classical, new age, lite jazz) and even one sad, neglected cassette. Fortunately, my therapist's own office is much more inviting, with its soothing, dim lighting and comfy, tasteful furniture. Each week, at around 4:01, I haul my depleted husk of a body into this room and plop down on an overstuffed black couch. My therapist, a 50-ish Polish woman with spiky blue hair and the wardrobe of a bohemian artist, asks me how I've been that week.

"Oh, I don't know," I'll usually say. "The same, I guess..."

Of Mice and Tigers: Conversations with my father

Deadmau5: The man in the mouse-head mask

So my uncle died this morning.

No condolences are necessary, at least not for me. I barely knew the man. He seemed nice, but  I only met him on a handful of occasions -- weddings, family reunions, etc. I don't really think of him as an uncle. I think of him as my father's brother. In fact, this man's death affects me only insofar as it affects my father.

A topic of conversation.

Since moving out of his house in 2001, I have remained in very frequent contact with my father. In fact, I telephone him every single day, usually the moment I get home from work, and we chat for 10-20 minutes, depending on his mood. This is not always easy. After all these decades, my father remains inscrutable. He's a tough guy to read. I never really know what he's thinking or feeling. I try to engage him about topics of interest to him -- politics, movies, sports, etc. I only know or care about sports to get through telephone conversations with my father. That's the extent of my interest. This fall, of course, the Detroit Tigers were a frequent topic of conversation. My father closely monitored the team's progress through the playoffs, and I did my best to keep up with him. I was genuinely disappointed when the team lost the World Series in four straight games, largely because their success had been something my dad and I could enjoy together. But our daily conversations have continued, of course. He generally leads these talks, often describing the events of his day in thorough, semi-excruciating detail. My job is to listen patiently. I do the best I can, but sometimes my patience wears thin.

It's difficult to gauge how my uncle's death is affecting my dad. He comes from a large family and is the second-to-youngest sibling, so he's been through this before. Shamefully, I do not know how many aunts and uncles on my father's side of the family remain alive. I do not care much for my father's extended family, to be honest, and I try to avoid them as much as possible. They are a gossipy, feuding bunch, and I am happy to live far away from them. This particular uncle,  however, seemed to be one of the nicer ones. Again, I didn't know him. I'm not sure how to talk to my father in the meantime. I'm not exactly a natural grief counselor, and this really isn't an ideal time for me to help anyone else through a crisis. Today, I spoke with my father for about 40 minutes, which is longer than usual. We talked about the specifics of my uncle's funeral (I cannot attend and am not expected to), but I also chatted with him about the current Petraeus scandal and about Oliver Stone's new miniseries which presents an alternative American history. My father taught history for 30 years, so I figured that he could discuss these matters intelligently. And he could. But I felt badly about avoiding the real issue.

So why the picture of Deadmau5 at the top of this article? I guess I've been thinking about this performer's odd career lately. He's a DJ who performs while wearing a giant mouse-shaped mask which covers his entire head. I'm not terribly interested in his music, but the mask concept fascinates me. How does this man feel when he puts on that mask? He's famous, but when his "face" appears on magazine covers (such as Rolling Stone), it's not really his face. It's that grinning mouse mask with the giant smile and the whited-out or x-shaped pupils. Is this limiting or emboldening? Will there come a point at which he says, "This is stupid. I'm not doing this anymore?" Maybe I'm so interested in Deadmau5 because I wish I had one of those mouse masks to hide my own face.

Or maybe I'm already wearing one, and it's just invisible.

HEALTH NEWS & NOTES: The side effects from Celexa have disappeared now that I've switched to Wellbutrin, and my libido and appetite are both restored. They don't rule my thoughts as much as they once did, which I guess is healthy. It's like the volume has been turned down on them. I only had one "storm" of depression within the last week, and that occurred on Saturday when my auto repair bill was more than I had anticipated. I had a mini-meltdown on Facebook over it, but the feeling of hopelessness didn't last. Other than that, I'm feeling pretty good. I have another session with my therapist tomorrow. I had a whole slate of issues I wanted to discuss, but my uncle's death will likely take top priority now. Work remains stressful, but I'm managing the stress. An office environment, sadly, can bring out the worst in people sometimes. That's just part of my life for the time being. Keep rooting for me.

An oh-so-important (really) update on my life and treatment

Why wouldn't I use the "Sesame Street News Flash" graphic?

That.... was an eventful day. Let me tell you all about it.

Yesterday, I had my first regular visit with a psychiatrist, whom I see once a month, and my second session with a therapist, whom I see once a week. Oh, and also I commuted back and forth to work by train. Work was so hectic that I was scrambling to finish tasks until the very last minute before having to make a mad dash for the train station. But I made it, readers. I made it. I guess I'll find out how well I did when I return to work and look at my inbox. If it's full of complaints, then I'll deal with them one at a time. (I hope it isn't.)

But back to the headshrinker thing...

A hugely under-reported issue in the health field is that many doctors and other medical professionals have their offices in nondescript professional buildings often nestled among a group of other nondescript professional buildings. Therefore, their offices can be damned tricky to find, and this is something which causes me stress. 

You know what else causes me stress? Driving to someplace new, especially if it's more than 20-25 minutes from my apartment. But my psychiatrist's office is in a community called Elgin, and it's maybe 40 minutes from where I live. Much of the drive time is spent on the expressways, which also number among my phobias. I rationally understand that our nation's highways were not deliberately designed as a baffling and cruel psychological experiment to torture me, Joe Blevins, personally. But it feels that way, you know? 

For you Illinois drivers in the audience, I took the 53 to the I-90 to get there. The I-90 is crawling with toll booths, which I hate and fear for multiple reasons. First I'm a cheapskate. Second, getting on and off the highway distracts me and makes me nervous. And third, I can't help but think of Sonny Corleone in The Godfather.

Bob Newhart he ain't.

But I got there and back, and now I'm "seeing a psychiatrist." I put that phrase in quotes because the experience is not at all like The Bob Newhart Show. I don't lie down on a couch and chat with him about my issues or anything. He's just an officious, distant medical professional with whom I spent about five minutes discussing my medications and the effect they were having on me. The good news is that I'm down from four meds to two. The Norvasc and Restoril have been benched, and he swapped out Wellbutrin for Celexa. Hopefully, this change will restore my libido. But, honestly, the whole "psychiatrist" experience is very impersonal. I spent most of the time filling out forms. Seeing a psychiatrist, in truth, is like seeing the Pope as he waves to a crowd from a balcony. My shrink's opening line to me was, "Do I know you?" I reminded him that, yes, we'd met a few weeks ago at the behavioral health center. I must have made a terrific impression on him.

The real "action" here takes place in therapy. Once a week, I meet with a woman in a nice, secluded and comfortable room, and I just vent about whatever's going on in my life. You can discuss a lot in an hour, and I talked through a number of issues, including my recent experience with the woman I call Helen. My therapist pointed out the obvious to me: a psych ward is maybe not the greatest place to pick up women. Whoops! Live and learn, right?

Before I leave you, I want to share a song which pretty much summarizes what it's like to see a therapist. It's called, appropriately enough, "Everything Reminds Me of My Therapist," and it's written and performed by Nancy Tucker.