That’s the number of milligrams of Lamictal I’ve been taking, like a human pill bottle tipped upside down. The titration up to 150 took weeks, then I felt that I needed more. I seem to have a pretty good instinct for the dosage of medications I need, according to my psychiatrist — a sort of compliment, I guess. So I jumped to 300 milligrams from 150. And whoo, did I respond.

Waking up at 3:00 am every night wide awake, ready for the day and hungry to do something. Namely, to buy something. And so I did: a $400 camera for one. But the strange thing came before the camera.

I’ve always been obsessed with writing instruments. As a kid, I’d spend long stretches at a downtown office supply store that catered to executives who wanted the fanciest pens and pencils. I lusted after those fountain pens, those complicated mechanical pencils. Flash-forward to today and naturally the obsession has transferred to computer keyboards. Apple’s slim keyboard looked good, but in the long run I didn’t like it. MacAlly’s keyboard the same: pretty, but the keys didn’t click just right, didn’t feel the way I wanted them to. This see-sawing has been going on for about 3 years, but it flew into manic gear after I increased the Lamictal.

Over a week of crazed nights I bought 5 keyboards. The one I was after is out of production, so I scoured eBay and other resellers for my model. I bought the wrong one, then a right one arrived with faulty “a-s-d” keys. The next? Bad space bar. I was able to return all these glitchy keyboards and eventually ended up with the right one, the alpha and omega of computer keyboards. For a few days there, I had at least two keyboards on hand at any given time. Crazy-time.

But at the same time I was becoming happier and happier. At first, I mistook my rabid consumerism for the spring of that contentedness, but now I realize that it was the power of Lamictal that lifted me from a malaise, and it was a side-effect of the drug that threw me into the spending spree.

I was vaguely aware that the massive jump in milligrams was responsible. Like a middling middle manager of my moods, I was responsible and ultimately failed to keep watch over what the 3 a.m. version of myself was up to.

So, a warning: Lamictal, a mood stabilizer purportedly good at preventing relapses into depression, has the potential to trigger the crazy. I’m over it now. But I’m still drawn to those luscious pens and pencils and keyboards.

You can take the boy out of the office supply store…