The bittersuite life of Zack and Cody.
What an appropriate way of spending my last full day in Schenectady: sitting alone at Bombers, eating a burrito that I got for free thanks to a fully-punched frequent burrito card I found last week by their register, and watching a perfectly beautiful day fade away as everyone in the world shows up here with their families, groups of friends, or significant others. Tia has plans with a cute boy I like a lot named Miguel. She thought I was leaving today because she doesn't listen when I speak. Matt works until close, so I don't get to meet up with him until around 10:30 tonight. As always, my only company is Kara via text. I'm wearing headphones so I don't have to hear anyone, though I fear that someone will go out of their way to be mean to me the longer I sit here. It seems I'm a magnet to that sort of attention. I wish I were invisible. At least then I could stare at everyone's legs, feet, and noses without being a total creep. A guy sitting across the restaurant from me at another table has been here all alone for over two hours. It makes me sad and comfortable at the same time. I wonder if I'm helping him feel the same way.
I just read through a bunch of testimonials by people who have taken Lexapro, the SSRI that I take to combat my social anxiety and chronic depression. I woke up today to a message from Kara, suggesting that maybe my gradual but dramatic weight gain, as well as my inability to lose it no matter my lifestyle choices or changes, may be a side effect of my pills. I won't lie, I have considered this before. My psychologist even suggested it once. But I shrugged it off each time because the concept of the only thing that has been able to help me live a semi-normal or emotionally tolerable life being single-handedly responsible for one of the biggest problems in my life was not something I was prepared to swallow. But as I read through the testimonials on that site, I got chills. It's always surreal reading someone else you don't know describe in perfect detail what you are experiencing. A lot of them said that the weight gain was very gradual-- and, for me, it definitely was: it was so gradual, in fact, that I didn't even notice it until it was too late. Most of them were only on low dosages, too-- I was started on 20mg a day and have stayed on that dosage, which is a particularly high one, sometimes even taking two pills a day because my doctor apparently lied to me and said 20mg was the highest dosage available. Almost all of them said the weight was centered around their torso, gut, and hips-- that's exclusively where my weight is; the rest of my body is more or less muscle. One of them was even a vegetarian and another an athlete-- but no matter what they did to try and combat their weight, they just couldn't lose it; this would explain why neither going vegan nor quitting soda or going to the gym has ever had an impact on the number I see on the scale. According to them, it takes about six weeks to start losing weight after dropping Lexapro, and someone said they started noticing a difference after just two. This is a very serious catch 22 for me, though: these pills have successfully lessened my urge to kill myself and helped me be more social and active despite my mental illness; however, they have apparently caused me to gain weight, which is currently one of the biggest issues causing me to want to kill myself and stress out. If I stop taking the pills, I could lose weight, which would greatly impact my self-esteem, social anxiety, and mood... but it will also cause my brain to return to the state it was in before I started taking these pills when I was 21. I don't know which is worse and it all seems like a lose-lose situation. I can either potentially lose weight and be crazy because of my chemical imbalances, or I can stay fat and probably get fatter and be crazy because of my weight problems. I could try to talk to a doctor and discuss taking a different medication, but the process of trying new pills until you find the right one for you is a very daunting one that in my experiences has been very scary and dangerous. Honestly, at this very moment, I am thinking I'm done taking them altogether. I don't know what to do.
I wrote the above yesterday, but Tia and Miguel showed up to keep me company, thankfully. So now I'm picking up where I left off.
Three pictures I took on some of my last days at 911 McClyman.
May 29th.
I didn't bother going to sleep since I had woken up at 10pm the night before. I spent the morning collecting some final things to pack and beginning to get shit together for PETA tour in my bookbag and rolling luggage. All of my belongings fit into two boxes. Besides those, all I had was my TV, the stand, my three keyboards, and a garbage bag filled with clothes and blankets. It was a relief to own even less than the last time I moved. It began raining, which was devastating, but thankfully died down after a couple hours by the time Tia's brother and other help showed up with a pick-up truck to get her things out of the apartment. They were able to get all of her things out with two vehicles and one trip. So was I, using my grandmother's car and Matt's. It started raining a little just as we finished dragging my things into the front room at my grandmother's house. She had already made a bitchy remark about the "straight fucking edge" patch on the back of the jacket that she'd gotten me and was beginning to annoyingly beg me to put my things in the basement, presumably so no one who came to the house would see it. The upstairs bedroom was the best and most convenient place, though, and I told her that's where it was going when I got back to the house later that night. By the time we got back to the apartment, it had once again returned to being sunny and for a little while it seemed like the rest of the day would actually seem like summer. Matt's brother Jay and his ex-girlfriend Amanda (who in an odd string of events is now Jay's girlfriend) came over to help dismantle his giant $1,500 bed and help us get some of his shit out. Matt was the only one who actually owned things and, unfortunately, he wasn't as willing to dump most of the frivolous bullshit he possessed. We took a break for a while, just hanging out in the living room by the fan while Amanda shared her total lack of knowledge regarding the reproductive process of chickens (she honestly believed that hens laid unfertilized eggs and that they miraculously became fertilized by a rooster sitting on the egg). Then it was time for Matt and I to go out and get a U-Haul truck. Loading his humongous queen-size mattress and the giant wooden pieces that comprised the frame, stand, and dresser drawers that surrounded it sucked a lot and for a brief second made me feel lucky that I didn't have parents that bought me things like beds. Then came the coffee table, the kitchen table, the chairs, and some other boxes of stuff he had. Loading it all out and into his parents' garage was a whole lot easier than getting it downstairs and into the truck. Thankfully for me, the bed was going up into Jay's room and I had no obligation to help them with that. That's when a light rain threatened to start back up.
We returned the truck and picked Tia up so we could all treat ourselves to Chinese food for a hard day's work. While there, a woman mentioned there being a tornado warning for Schenectady. We get those sometimes, sure, but our elevation just isn't suited at all for tornadoes to really be possible, which is why there hasn't been a tornado here since the '80s. The closest a tornado has hit since is Mechanicville, a rural part of our area code not that close by. The very second I texted Kara the words, "Why do they even bother giving Schenectady a tornado warning?" the sky turned black and large streaks of lightning began crashing behind the trees across the street one after the other with billowy eruptions of thunder quickly following. The sky looked pretty ominous and rain began to pour, so we got out of there. It was only a couple minutes before the rain has escalated to such a thick and heavy downpour that even with windshield wipers we could not really see ahead of us in Matt's car. The lightning and thunder was quick and winds were getting very strong. Kara texted me, "A funnel cloud was just spotted on Altamont and Curry!" A few minutes later as we drove through flooded roads, she texted me saying, "They're telling everyone in Schenectady to seek shelter in basements." We were in the car, though. As scary as things were, I was still confident there would be no tornado, once again reminding myself of statistics. Tia was freaking out in the back seat, of course. Matt was just afraid being submerged the way that he was in these flooded roads on Broadway would fuck his car up. We drove Tia back to her mom's first. No one in the 'hood seemed phased by the storm. People were nonchalantly riding their bikes through it, running around, or just hanging out on their porches as if it were a perfectly calm summer day. I don't think anyone gives less of a fuck than the people in poor neighborhoods. By the time we got rid of Tia, the storm started clearing. We had to stop at the apartment again just so we could pick up a few leftovers. By the time I was back at my grandmother's, the storm was over. I started immediately bringing my things up into the back room. I was going on twenty-two hours without sleep and a day full of physical exertion. After I brought up the heaviest box, I quit and collapsed onto the bed with the fan blowing on me at high. I was passed out within a minute and didn't wake up until 3pm the next day.
May 30th.
I ate some toast and a banana, took a shower, and then headed over to the apartment to help Matt, Amanda, and ay finish packing up some things. Fortunately for me, they had everything pretty much finished. Matt used his car to finish bringing some remaining belongings of his as well as our dishes to his parents' place. I sat around and waited for Kara to show up. She looked really pretty that day. She was wearing a shirt and mismatched knee-high socks with a torn-up Plan-It-X shirt that showed off her perfect collar bones. It was difficult to look at her and know she wasn't mine anymore. We hung out until Matt showed up and then we got Tia. The plan was to all hang out together one last official time before I left for two months. We went to DP Dough and stuffed our faces, hanging out there for a while in their air conditioning. It was a lot of fun and the weather was nice. We went back to the apartment for a final run-through to make sure we weren't leaving anything important behind. We left a lot of trash behind, most of which was put into garbage bags. I left my beds, we left the couch, we left the blinds, but we took the shower head we had to buy and our mailbox. A few days before, I'd found a McClyman street sign that had been torn down and left in the lot behind our apartment. I absolutely had to snag it, so we took a picture of it together as a final goodbye. We went downstairs to say goodbye to Mary and thank her for letting us live in the apartment, returning our keys and asking if we could count on her to be a good reference if need be in the future. As usual, she followed us and wouldn't let us escape the conversation quickly. When we asked her if she had any potential tenants lined up, she told us she probably wouldn't have anyone living up there for another year and a half. She admitted outright that there was so much wrong with our apartment that it was actually illegal to. I'm not sure if I'm thankful or offended that she let us live somewhere that she knew for a fact was not suited for tenancy. We drove around for a little while with the windows down, browsing the tree damage amounted from the storm and envying all the yuppie houses in Rotterdam before dropping Tia off and bringing Kara back home. I was going to miss her a lot. Then I just had to get a soda from that gas station where I ran into that kid that sent me spiraling into a night-long existential crisis about my weight. It wasn't a good night after that, but in retrospect, what better way to have Schenectady say goodbye?
I won't lie, I'm totally nervous about leaving today, and not just because the prospect of being on a Greyhound bus for three and a half days (for the third time in my life) is a pretty miserable one. I'm afraid I won't be good enough for the PETA team, honestly. I'm afraid that I won't be able to properly handle the inevitable asshole or two that I'll run into at these gigs. I'm afraid I'll break down due to the long hours and the hot weather. I've never tried so hard to do something before. Just in May, I wound up dropping $225 on a passport because they told me I needed to last minute. Apparently, I was the only person out of the hundreds of people on Warped who didn't have one and so they had no idea what an enhanced license even was. Of course, I did it. I've invested time, money, and effort into ensuring that I follow this dream. I made sure to have food for the bus ride: a package of bagels, a container of cream cheese, and a big container of rice mixed with three types of beans and bacon bits. I got enough pills to last me the trip, though I'm still unsure if I should keep taking them or not. All my friends thing I should at least keep taking them while on tour because of the heightened social situations and I know they're probably right. I got some vegan sunscreen, a little notebook to keep notes in during my days so I can keep updating this thing, filled out and submitted my change of address form to the post office, and am going to pay two months of my cellphone in advance before I head down to the bus depot.
I just read through a bunch of testimonials by people who have taken Lexapro, the SSRI that I take to combat my social anxiety and chronic depression. I woke up today to a message from Kara, suggesting that maybe my gradual but dramatic weight gain, as well as my inability to lose it no matter my lifestyle choices or changes, may be a side effect of my pills. I won't lie, I have considered this before. My psychologist even suggested it once. But I shrugged it off each time because the concept of the only thing that has been able to help me live a semi-normal or emotionally tolerable life being single-handedly responsible for one of the biggest problems in my life was not something I was prepared to swallow. But as I read through the testimonials on that site, I got chills. It's always surreal reading someone else you don't know describe in perfect detail what you are experiencing. A lot of them said that the weight gain was very gradual-- and, for me, it definitely was: it was so gradual, in fact, that I didn't even notice it until it was too late. Most of them were only on low dosages, too-- I was started on 20mg a day and have stayed on that dosage, which is a particularly high one, sometimes even taking two pills a day because my doctor apparently lied to me and said 20mg was the highest dosage available. Almost all of them said the weight was centered around their torso, gut, and hips-- that's exclusively where my weight is; the rest of my body is more or less muscle. One of them was even a vegetarian and another an athlete-- but no matter what they did to try and combat their weight, they just couldn't lose it; this would explain why neither going vegan nor quitting soda or going to the gym has ever had an impact on the number I see on the scale. According to them, it takes about six weeks to start losing weight after dropping Lexapro, and someone said they started noticing a difference after just two. This is a very serious catch 22 for me, though: these pills have successfully lessened my urge to kill myself and helped me be more social and active despite my mental illness; however, they have apparently caused me to gain weight, which is currently one of the biggest issues causing me to want to kill myself and stress out. If I stop taking the pills, I could lose weight, which would greatly impact my self-esteem, social anxiety, and mood... but it will also cause my brain to return to the state it was in before I started taking these pills when I was 21. I don't know which is worse and it all seems like a lose-lose situation. I can either potentially lose weight and be crazy because of my chemical imbalances, or I can stay fat and probably get fatter and be crazy because of my weight problems. I could try to talk to a doctor and discuss taking a different medication, but the process of trying new pills until you find the right one for you is a very daunting one that in my experiences has been very scary and dangerous. Honestly, at this very moment, I am thinking I'm done taking them altogether. I don't know what to do.
I wrote the above yesterday, but Tia and Miguel showed up to keep me company, thankfully. So now I'm picking up where I left off.
Three pictures I took on some of my last days at 911 McClyman.
May 29th.
I didn't bother going to sleep since I had woken up at 10pm the night before. I spent the morning collecting some final things to pack and beginning to get shit together for PETA tour in my bookbag and rolling luggage. All of my belongings fit into two boxes. Besides those, all I had was my TV, the stand, my three keyboards, and a garbage bag filled with clothes and blankets. It was a relief to own even less than the last time I moved. It began raining, which was devastating, but thankfully died down after a couple hours by the time Tia's brother and other help showed up with a pick-up truck to get her things out of the apartment. They were able to get all of her things out with two vehicles and one trip. So was I, using my grandmother's car and Matt's. It started raining a little just as we finished dragging my things into the front room at my grandmother's house. She had already made a bitchy remark about the "straight fucking edge" patch on the back of the jacket that she'd gotten me and was beginning to annoyingly beg me to put my things in the basement, presumably so no one who came to the house would see it. The upstairs bedroom was the best and most convenient place, though, and I told her that's where it was going when I got back to the house later that night. By the time we got back to the apartment, it had once again returned to being sunny and for a little while it seemed like the rest of the day would actually seem like summer. Matt's brother Jay and his ex-girlfriend Amanda (who in an odd string of events is now Jay's girlfriend) came over to help dismantle his giant $1,500 bed and help us get some of his shit out. Matt was the only one who actually owned things and, unfortunately, he wasn't as willing to dump most of the frivolous bullshit he possessed. We took a break for a while, just hanging out in the living room by the fan while Amanda shared her total lack of knowledge regarding the reproductive process of chickens (she honestly believed that hens laid unfertilized eggs and that they miraculously became fertilized by a rooster sitting on the egg). Then it was time for Matt and I to go out and get a U-Haul truck. Loading his humongous queen-size mattress and the giant wooden pieces that comprised the frame, stand, and dresser drawers that surrounded it sucked a lot and for a brief second made me feel lucky that I didn't have parents that bought me things like beds. Then came the coffee table, the kitchen table, the chairs, and some other boxes of stuff he had. Loading it all out and into his parents' garage was a whole lot easier than getting it downstairs and into the truck. Thankfully for me, the bed was going up into Jay's room and I had no obligation to help them with that. That's when a light rain threatened to start back up.
We returned the truck and picked Tia up so we could all treat ourselves to Chinese food for a hard day's work. While there, a woman mentioned there being a tornado warning for Schenectady. We get those sometimes, sure, but our elevation just isn't suited at all for tornadoes to really be possible, which is why there hasn't been a tornado here since the '80s. The closest a tornado has hit since is Mechanicville, a rural part of our area code not that close by. The very second I texted Kara the words, "Why do they even bother giving Schenectady a tornado warning?" the sky turned black and large streaks of lightning began crashing behind the trees across the street one after the other with billowy eruptions of thunder quickly following. The sky looked pretty ominous and rain began to pour, so we got out of there. It was only a couple minutes before the rain has escalated to such a thick and heavy downpour that even with windshield wipers we could not really see ahead of us in Matt's car. The lightning and thunder was quick and winds were getting very strong. Kara texted me, "A funnel cloud was just spotted on Altamont and Curry!" A few minutes later as we drove through flooded roads, she texted me saying, "They're telling everyone in Schenectady to seek shelter in basements." We were in the car, though. As scary as things were, I was still confident there would be no tornado, once again reminding myself of statistics. Tia was freaking out in the back seat, of course. Matt was just afraid being submerged the way that he was in these flooded roads on Broadway would fuck his car up. We drove Tia back to her mom's first. No one in the 'hood seemed phased by the storm. People were nonchalantly riding their bikes through it, running around, or just hanging out on their porches as if it were a perfectly calm summer day. I don't think anyone gives less of a fuck than the people in poor neighborhoods. By the time we got rid of Tia, the storm started clearing. We had to stop at the apartment again just so we could pick up a few leftovers. By the time I was back at my grandmother's, the storm was over. I started immediately bringing my things up into the back room. I was going on twenty-two hours without sleep and a day full of physical exertion. After I brought up the heaviest box, I quit and collapsed onto the bed with the fan blowing on me at high. I was passed out within a minute and didn't wake up until 3pm the next day.
May 30th.
I ate some toast and a banana, took a shower, and then headed over to the apartment to help Matt, Amanda, and ay finish packing up some things. Fortunately for me, they had everything pretty much finished. Matt used his car to finish bringing some remaining belongings of his as well as our dishes to his parents' place. I sat around and waited for Kara to show up. She looked really pretty that day. She was wearing a shirt and mismatched knee-high socks with a torn-up Plan-It-X shirt that showed off her perfect collar bones. It was difficult to look at her and know she wasn't mine anymore. We hung out until Matt showed up and then we got Tia. The plan was to all hang out together one last official time before I left for two months. We went to DP Dough and stuffed our faces, hanging out there for a while in their air conditioning. It was a lot of fun and the weather was nice. We went back to the apartment for a final run-through to make sure we weren't leaving anything important behind. We left a lot of trash behind, most of which was put into garbage bags. I left my beds, we left the couch, we left the blinds, but we took the shower head we had to buy and our mailbox. A few days before, I'd found a McClyman street sign that had been torn down and left in the lot behind our apartment. I absolutely had to snag it, so we took a picture of it together as a final goodbye. We went downstairs to say goodbye to Mary and thank her for letting us live in the apartment, returning our keys and asking if we could count on her to be a good reference if need be in the future. As usual, she followed us and wouldn't let us escape the conversation quickly. When we asked her if she had any potential tenants lined up, she told us she probably wouldn't have anyone living up there for another year and a half. She admitted outright that there was so much wrong with our apartment that it was actually illegal to. I'm not sure if I'm thankful or offended that she let us live somewhere that she knew for a fact was not suited for tenancy. We drove around for a little while with the windows down, browsing the tree damage amounted from the storm and envying all the yuppie houses in Rotterdam before dropping Tia off and bringing Kara back home. I was going to miss her a lot. Then I just had to get a soda from that gas station where I ran into that kid that sent me spiraling into a night-long existential crisis about my weight. It wasn't a good night after that, but in retrospect, what better way to have Schenectady say goodbye?
I won't lie, I'm totally nervous about leaving today, and not just because the prospect of being on a Greyhound bus for three and a half days (for the third time in my life) is a pretty miserable one. I'm afraid I won't be good enough for the PETA team, honestly. I'm afraid that I won't be able to properly handle the inevitable asshole or two that I'll run into at these gigs. I'm afraid I'll break down due to the long hours and the hot weather. I've never tried so hard to do something before. Just in May, I wound up dropping $225 on a passport because they told me I needed to last minute. Apparently, I was the only person out of the hundreds of people on Warped who didn't have one and so they had no idea what an enhanced license even was. Of course, I did it. I've invested time, money, and effort into ensuring that I follow this dream. I made sure to have food for the bus ride: a package of bagels, a container of cream cheese, and a big container of rice mixed with three types of beans and bacon bits. I got enough pills to last me the trip, though I'm still unsure if I should keep taking them or not. All my friends thing I should at least keep taking them while on tour because of the heightened social situations and I know they're probably right. I got some vegan sunscreen, a little notebook to keep notes in during my days so I can keep updating this thing, filled out and submitted my change of address form to the post office, and am going to pay two months of my cellphone in advance before I head down to the bus depot.