I'm watching "The Number 23" with my little sister.

We're both internet addicts and both quite ADD, so we're doing other things while watching. Good thing too, cause I'm freaked the hell out, and I'm sure I'd be even more so if I was paying full attention to it.

Okay, it's over now. Let's just say it wasn't my favorite movie ever. Reeeeally weird. All the stuff they said about 23 was pretty crazy. They claim its a real phenomenon that many people are kind of obsessed with. I'm going to try to put it out of my head, since I'm prone to semi-obsessive thinking. I didn't like seeing Jim Carrey in a role like that, either. I love him for his comedy, so I hated seeing him this way. There were several pretty intense sex scenes, and it was just too weird to see freakin Jim Carrey having intense sex. I mean, he's Ace Ventura. He's Lloyd from Dumb and Dumber. He's the crazy-ass Mask guy. I have no desire to see any of those characters having sex. Ever.

It was all a little uncomfortable, because I remembered some obsessive paranoid thoughts I had during my manic episode. I became convinced that there was some huge significance to the number 17- my favorite number, my soccer number, and the day of my birth- January 17th. I suddenly kept noticing the number popping up everywhere, seemed like everywhere I looked. I'd be driving and randomly look up at a mile marker, and it would be 117, or the clock kept saying 2:17, 4:17, 11:17, when I looked up; things like that. I realized that my first and second boyfriends both had the number 17 in their aim screen name, as I did. The guy I had really liked about a year previous had 17 in his sn too. Some Jehovah's witnesses came to the door at my apartment, and when I opened the door and didn't slam it right away, they started telling me how Christ was coming again and the world was coming to an end, citing chapter 17 of the book of Revelation. I know it was just the mania; me making connections where no connections existed, giving great significance to insignificant things. It definitely freaked me out, but of course, when I came back down from the episode, all the 17 stuff stopped. I remembered that I had been so sure of the number's significance, but I stopped seeing it and believing it.

That whole thing is more a source of embarrassment now, (although thats probably not the right word because no one knows but me, I guess "shame" is better) when I think about the kind of things I was thinking about during that ordeal. That's actually a huge part of why I was depressed for so long afterwards; not just the 17 thing specifically, but everything I thought and believed that was unreasonable and illogical. That shame, combined with my plummetting seratonin levels, kept me down for quite some time. It was really hard for me to forgive myself for all of that, and I guess I actually still haven't. It may sound weird to say "forgive myself", but I really hated myself for the mania for a long time, even though it wasn't my fault. The thought that I could -and probably will at some point- be that way again, haunts me all the time.

Geez, I have myself a little creeped out again thinkin about the 17 stuff... and now this stupid 23 stuff. I gotta snap out of it. I'm going to sleep, since my sister and I have been major insomniacs lately. She's leaving for college -the big freshman year- in a few weeks, so we've been burning the midnight oil with movie marathons and tivo'ed shark week shows. I reeeeally need to fix my sleep patterns; getting too "off" has tripped me into depression before- it may have played a part in the mania too. Add the bad sleep patterns to my less than stellar record of medication consumption of late, and suddenly I'm really tempting fate.

On that note, I'm off to bed. Gotta look for jobs tomorrow, I'm tired of being broke and bored. Surely employment will also help my self esteem rut and borderline-depression that I've been in lately. Wish me luck!