Yesterday I accidentally took a double dose of my medication (I took one pill when I woke up, took my shower, then forgot that I had taken the pill and took another one). This had some odd effects and gave me something of a headache. I decided today that I would take a day off the medication to normalize again.
One of the effects of taking my medication is to make me notably less impulsive. It used to be that I would be sitting at my desk at home and think to myself, "I don't want to read this history assignment! I want to see a movie!" and before I thought twice about it my boots were on and I was out the door. I'd go to a movie theater not knowing what was on, figure out which movies were playing within an easy wait of when I arrived, and then pick randomly between the reasonable choices. No room for rational thought! That doesn't happen so much anymore, and one of the upshots of my taking this medication is that I only really go to the movies when I'm at home. Which is a shame, because I like seeing movies in theaters.
But the movies are neither here nor there. The point is: when off my meds, I'm quite impulsive. So today I went out for something to eat. When they didn't have any eggplant for an eggplant marinara sandwich, I found myself walking three miles downtown to get a slice of vegan death by chocolate cake from a store I quite like. It was quite tasty.
And because I was in an impulsive mood this evening, I called a friend I haven't talked to in a few months, Pam Woo, who's started a Ph.D. program in Film at Chicago. I'd been meaning to call for a while, but tonight I just picked up the phone. And we chatted for over an hour. And it was fun.
And then I hung up and, in a move I probably wouldn't have made if I had sat back and soberly reflected on the situation, I booked a round-trip ticket to Chicago and back for the weekend before Thanksgiving to see Pam. That week is going to be a very heavy travel week for me, between a trip to Chicago, then back to New York, then out to Arizona, then back to New York again.
But I'll probably have a lot more fun than I would have sitting around my apartment in New York, and I almost certainly wouldn't have gotten anything productive done here, anyway. Hell, I'll likely get more productivity out of the flights there and back than I would have gotten from a weekend "studying" around the apartment.
I am beginning to wonder if being in control of my impulses isn't somewhat less of a good thing than it's cracked up to be.
