After taking the medication for two weeks, the depression seems to have gone without the sudden, disconcerting change of St. John’s Wort.

Yet this medication leads to a bit of confusion. Emotions influence my attitude toward decisions. By changing my emotions the medication changes my attitude toward decisions, even though none of the other facts surrounding the decisions are changing. The effect reminds me of sitting in a train not knowing whether the train has started moving or the other train out the window has started moving in the other direction.

I have been able to run more, with the result that I overdid it last Wednesday coming down the hill. My left hamstring is still sore.

I still have some trouble sleeping.

Sometimes I find myself quite tense. That was no doubt the case before, though now the tension no longer seems linked with emotion. My body can be tense while my mind is relatively at ease.

The Citroën Ax that I drive to work has made it to 199,999 km.

I have been driving this car since buying it used in 1999. Once the cylinder head gasket needed replacement. The car has also had a few smaller repairs along the way. The door handles on the passenger side have stopped working altogether, as has the driver side window and the lock on the trunk. The engine uses a bit more gas than it used to. But the car still seems to run fine.

The Ax is a relatively simple, small car. Simplicity may be part of the key to longevity for machines.

Wednesday my doctor looked at the results of a battery of blood tests. I went over to his office Tuesday, but could not face the waiting room. Wednesday after finding no problems in the test results the doctor took my blood pressure. He listened to my heart and lungs. He found nothing physically wrong. He suggested stopping the plant-based treatment, which did not seem to be effective. Instead he suggested trying fluoxetine, also known as Prozac.

Fluoxetine has a very gradual onset. The doctor told me I might not notice anything for two weeks. It is no doubt too soon to tell after only four 20 mg pills. The handful of mood downturns experienced since Wednesday morning have not turned into the tailspin of Monday afternoon through Tuesday afternoon. I have no idea whether that has something to do with the drug.

Perhaps the chickens are coming home to roost because for 25 years I have been slinking away from the effort and risk of learning to do something that fits with what I value. If the short term project is to recover from despair, the medium term project must be to take the necessary next steps.

I have been using unison to synchronize a work laptop with my $HOME at work. Unison seems to work very well between Ubuntu and Solaris once you have the same version of unison on both ends.

At home, I tried with unison to backup all the $HOMEs on our main PC to an external disk. I was too tired last night to figure out why unison appeared to be able to figure out what needed to be copied, but then failed to copy anything.

This morning I was looking at the GNU cp man page. It turns out that if you are going one way, just making a backup, GNU cp has not only the -p option to preserve file attributes like mode and timestamp, but also has the -u option:

-u, –update
copy only when the SOURCE file is newer than the destination
file or when the destination file is missing

Nice. Especially for someone who is too lazy to do things right.

Update: Well, here’s what I get for trying to use FAT32 on the external drive so I can share it between systems:

File size limit exceeded (core dumped)