Pass the salt, please.

I can't at all complain about my work speed recently. I've integrated the two version of Chapter 5 in just 3-1/2 hours. My boss, that is to say I, am pleased.

The higher lithium dose has been a wonder drug. However, it's not without its annoying and disturbing side effect. A few times a day I get the shakes. They're exactly what they sound like. It seems a small price to pay for what the lithium is doing.

Lithium is actually Lithium Carbonate, a salt. The simplest psychiatric drug there is. I got curious because nobody, including my psychiatrist, seemed to know who discovered it and how. It seems the drug was discovered by accident by an Australian Psychiatrist, John Cade. He was injecting the urine of manic patients into guinea pigs, and needed a solvent to keep uric acid crystals from forming. So he gave the manic patients lithium as a solvent. To his surprise it relieved the mania.

Why didn't he get a Nobel Prize? Instead of Cade, the only psychiatrist ever to receive a Nobel Prize got it for inventing the frontal lobotomy, an now discredited surgery. But at the time, doctors embraced it as the cure-all.
 
My writing time tomorrow is short because I have a doctor's appointment. I'm considering I should get through at least a thousand words tomorrow, in about an hour and forty minutes. If I get that far I'll be happy.

Where does the rest of my time go? I read, currently Jonathon Franzen. Reading is terribly important to writing, (as Stephen King says and I believe) and I have a lot to catch up on. I'm going through a fellow writer's book for later group critique. That's necessary so my writers' group will do it for me. There's also learning, serious reading that takes longer, and is monotonous. My course of choice right now is Terms of Service. Yes, whenever I get anything and it asks me to accept the TOS, I print it up, put it in a folder. I'm just about caught up, and then I can move on to learning OpenOffice.

I went to a Sex+ event today at Shameless Grounds. The discussion was on homophobia in the African-American community. I was there for curiosity. I took notes and listened but didn't really participate. I'll add details on who gave the talk later, because I'm out of writing time now.