Here's to hoping.  This post is going to be kind of a free-range, stream of consiousness sort of bit...I may clean it up later, may not, apologies in advance.

First, let me say that having just discovered Justice Gray's blog, I am totally down with this guy.  He reminds me of a Canadian me.  Not to imply that a Canadian me is in some way a lesser me...well...maybe a little...All jokes aside, subscribe it up bitches, this guy has something good to say all the time, and I love the way he presents his brain goo.  Two posts of his kind of mirrored and solidified the ideas I'm about to talk about here, namely this one and this one.

On with the show

Last year I suffered some rather large setbacks with my mental state.  I ended up with some really acute anxiety and depression issues.  They grew, starting in January, to a point in October where I was almost completely non-functional.  I tried to ignore them and power through them, but it wasn't working.  Nothing was working.  I had what someone (who I barely know, but whom I consider a friend now) calls "Snakes in the Head" (not as cool as the similarly titled movie, but apropos as it turns out).  You see, by October, I was on the tail end of a project that was supposed to have shipped anywhere from 6 months to a year prior (depending who you ask) and that, it turns out, had 3 months left.  But by October, I couldn't even open Visual Studio.  I could barely get out of bed.

I finally went to a doctor.  He put me on an SSRI called Lexapro.  My first question was "how long until it kicks in and I can function?"  My response to the answer (3 weeks) was...not pretty.  However, I got on it, and by mid-November, I was at least quasi functional.  I got through the project.  I could concentrate on one thing at a time, but it turns out that was enough.  I was able to put in 20 hour days from basically Thanksgiving to February 1, and I won't sugarcoat it, the project would have been a failure were it not for that effort.

However, during that time, I was...I don't know.  A shell.  A pod person.  My mental clarity was off.  My motivation was way low.  I regained all of the weight I had lost.  I stopped blogging.  Stopped reading blogs.  Stopped interacting with people (did pick up a girlfriend though, she's amazing, and understood my mental state).  I was a one trick pony, a mere robot cranking out code, eating, and sleeping.  And I started smoking again while I spent a month in New York trying to go the last mile on this project.  Quit smoking Feb 2005.  Started again Jan 2007.  Right back to a pack a day.  That was not good.  (also a little scary that I picked that habit up again so easily).

So about 3 weeks ago my prescription ran out.  I opted not to renew.  I have heard that this is a bad idea.  I'm still kind of waiting for the fallout, but I think I'm prepared mentally.  In the meantime however, I have noticed that a lot of my drive is returning, my clarity is up, my motivation is up, I am mentally involved in my life again.  This, I like.

So, I'm trying to pick up the pieces now.  I feel better, really, I feel awesome.  Some of my anxiety symptoms have returned, but I'm in a much better place mentally to deal with them, and they aren't really interfering at all.

Anyway, call it spring cleaning or whatever you will, but I've become motivated to take on a reformat->repave of ME.  The nonspecifics at this time are:

• Lose weight.  I gained back 35 pounds between September of last year and now.  It's gotta go. 
• More healthy practices.  Better food.  No smoking.  Exercise.
• More reading.
• More blogging (check!  so far anyway)
• More learning new things and engaging my brain.
• More keeping my house clean (over those 4 months or so I lived at my desk and my bed, and you could tell.  It was bad.  I undertook a MAJOR cleaning project last week that I'm still finishing.)
• More working on interesting projects - again, engaging the brain.

Some people say that if you try to do everything at once, you will just collapse under the weight of it all and fail.  I've followed that philosophy before with mixed results, but I don't know, seems like I always end up failing anyway.  So I started thinking (around the same time I got a new laptop) about another approach.

When you reformat and rebuild a computer, you dump it all, right then and there.  Back up the important stuff, wipe the slate clean, and start over.  You can't just do it piecemeal.  Let's say you have a bunch of spyware, crapware, and all around bloat.  Does it ever work to try to remove it one thing at a time?  No.  You start over.  Tabula Rossa.  So that's what I'm going to attempt to do.  I figure if I totally shock myself out of bad habits and into good ones, by sheer force of will, they are more likely to stick.  The effort up front will be tremendous, but it will blaze those new neural pathways to a clean and efficient system.  That's the plan anyway.

I like Justice's idea of a reading list plan, but I think a book a week may be a little more than I can handle given my other time commitments, so I'm going to break it up a little differently.  When I finish formulating my plan (i'm going to try to make it have math, in some way.  go math) I'll post about it, and hope that motivates me to keep to it.  Maybe it will, maybe it won't, maybe this experiment will fail colosally and I will realize the folly of the FULL HUMAN REBOOT PROJECT (just made that up...going with it), but it's worth a shot right?  I mean, if we can't experiment with and reprogram our own minds and bodies, then who the hell are we to try to tell a computer what to do?