(It hardly seems possible this was the view from my apartment window exactly two months ago)Spring has long since sprung here in North Carolina. And whether it's the lusty burst through of new life in the grass and trees, or the alignment of the planets, the same might cautiously be said about my take on life. I feel it's possible - not definite - that I could be reentering life after a six-year absence in a cowl of depression (due to bipolar disorder.) So, although it's extremely unlikely anybody is reading this (since it's actually been entirely oflline for a few months), I felt the urge to blog.

But where to start? Jeez, so much under the bridge in the last year. I think I'll let that come out in dribs and drabs (assuming I am truly to start blogging regularly again) and restrict myself today to things I found amusing today.

Long story short, today was my first day back at work after recent liposuction surgery. Yes, after living in Hollywood for ten years, I waited until I moved to homely North Carolina to have plastic surgery. Things they don't tell you about liposuction: for several weeks afterwards, you'll actually be bigger and heavier than when you started. This is because - quite understandably - the body doesn't entirely like having its fat cells sucked out by a straw and therefore protests by replacing the lost cells with ample fluid.

You also have to wear a compression pad around your torso for the first few weeks, which, if you wear it under your clothes makes you look yet fatter. In fact, since the surgery, on the 17th, I've felt distinctly like a jacket potato. Not only did I have an aversion to reappearing in the office even fatter than before, I didn't want my colleagues to even know that my recent surgery absence had been on the cosmetic side. Solution: wear the compression vest outside my shirt, and let everybody assume (as they have done) that I had back surgery. This has the enjoyable side-effect of gaining me some "ouch" sympathy. And, besides, in NC, nobody would dare to judge me on fashion terms.

Apparently, I'd misunderstood what the plastic surgeon had said to me before the operation about looking like an eggplant. He'd said it in the context of bruising and swelling, so I'd naturally assumed that he meant that my torso would be bruised in the color of an eggplant. It wasn't until a couple of days after the surgery that I noticed that my penis felt unusually thick in my hand (don't ask), and I would have been horrified, if I weren't English, when I pulled my entire genital apparatus out of my underwear to discover not only the immense swelling and discoloration of my foreskin, but also the great enlargement of my scrotum (which looked, as you might now expect, like an eggplant.) Fortunately, I had Ben (who's an MD) staying with me, who  reassured me it was perfectly normal.

Ben can (occasionally) be very funny. I'd texted him very early this morning when I got up and found that my testicles had returned to their normal size ("the size of tennis-balls, not that I'm boasting...", I texted him.) He thanked me for waking him up at six-thirty a.m. with that  information.

The amusing bit came later. Ben had emailed me a link to a new book that sounded like we'd both like to read, about the origins of life, and I wrote back, joking "I wonder if it makes any difference if the carbon atoms I grew up with as a fetus came from the star Betelgeuse or the star Sirius." Quick as a flash, he wrote back that judging by the size of my tennis balls, it must have been Betelgeuse. (Now I write that, I'm not so sure it's funny.)

I suppose this pulls me towards a more serious side of things: how did I get fat? After all, I've always prided myself on being in good shape, and had never conceived the idea that I could ever be fat. It started back two years ago, when I went through a horrible few months trying what seemed at the time a last-grasp effort to get out of depression, by undergoing a course of Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT). Since it meant I had to come off all of my psychiatric medication, and then have my  brain electrocuted under general anesthetic several times a week, not unnaturally, I didn't really get to exercise for a couple of months.

To cut a long and boring story short, the ECT failed, and my depression kept going, and I never really got back into the habit of working out.

A year later, and the next step in an attempt at recovery was even more radical: Ben and I sold our house in Hollywood, CA, and relocated across country, Ben to New York City, and me to Durham, North Carolina. But living apart has been tough, and I got into the terrible habit of having a large drink of vodka before going to bed every night. Even worse, I'd double up on it one or more times overnight whenever I woke up, because the thought of being conscious in the middle of the night was scary. I was never an alcoholic, but I was definitely subjecting myself to a course of medical self-treatment.

Strange to say, and perhaps horrible to admit, but I think it did actually work. I'm not sure I'd have made it through the last year without some resort like that to break away, for however short a period, from depression.

The huge (literally) downside was that apparently there's no easier way to gain belly fat than to drink at night. I really couldn't believe how much of a beer gut I got in just a few months. I knew it was happening, and I hated it, but I was so apathetic and unhappy I couldn't see any way to break out of the pattern. And soon I was finding more and more of my wardrobe (which had always been on the tight-fitting side of things) would no longer fit. And I hated the way I looked, and it was now - in an overall sense - making my depression worse.

So one day, about a month ago, with the knowledge that my liposuction surgery was coming up soon, I just poured all of my vodka away. I didn't know if I'd be able to keep it up. For a while, I would feel very empty when it came time to go to bed, knowing I didn't have a ready escape valve. But as time goes on, it begins to feel more and more unlikely that I'll go to one of the state liquor stores to buy a bottle of vodka. Never have I been happier that alcohol isn't sold in supermarkets here!

Now, although I'm still feeling very bloated from the surgery, I feel as if I'm genuinely looking forward to starting to exercise again. The weather here, since Spring sprung, has been mostly heavenly, and I look enviously at the many people I see jogging in the street outside my window. I hope that will be me in a couple of weeks.