xiphias | Entries tagged with my mind

I had a nightmare last night.

One part of it involved trying to convince a gate agent that I should be allowed to get on a plane because, y'see, I had a freakin' TICKET to the plane and it's RIGHT HERE AND I'M SHOWING IT TO YOU.

I have nightmares about trying to deal with bureaucracy at airports.

Does this mean I'm a grownup?

(There were other parts of the nightmare, too . . . I dreamed that my cousin Ben, who we rarely see, died unexpectedly, leaving his wife and child, and his wife was pregnant again, and we went to the funeral. I think that's why I was going on the airplane in the first place. And that was AWFUL. The fact that I wasn't wearing pants was just, y'know, frosting on top. Oh, also, the gate agent at the airport knew perfectly well who I was -- and even knew my sister. Apparently, Leila had flown out of that airport on that airline so often that she and the gate agent were actually friends. In any case, the way that the airline thing was resolved was that, even though I didn't have the RIGHT kind of photo ID -- apparently, a driver's license was suddenly not good enough -- one of the other gate agents went to an internet terminal and downloaded some photos of me in elementary school that happened to be online. And those, apparently, WERE good enough. At that point, I felt really bad about having yelled at them, because they really went above and beyond the call of duty in helping me out, so I apologized abjectly for losing my temper. Also, at the place where the funeral was being held, there were a couple other events going on at the same time -- a wedding, and a couple of birthday parties. I remember the look of shock on the bride's face as her white limo pulled in, passing a hearse and a long line of cars forming a funeral procession.)

One advantage in dealing with my depression is that I have is that I've been depressed for a long time.

You may think that that doesn't sound like a very great advantage.

And you'd be right.

But nonetheless, it is an advantage.

Because when I have a day in which I feel like everything sucks, like I feel like I should just give up on everything I'm trying to do because it's all worthless, when I really don't even quite have it in me to get dressed, I know that it's not real. I know that things AREN'T as hopeless as they feel, that I'm NOT as worthless as I feel, and I know that tomorrow will be different.

If I didn't have experience with this, I might think it was real.

As it is, I know that today was a loss. Nothing got done, nothing went forward. But I know that nothing got UNDONE, either. I didn't make progress, but I didn't regress.

And tomorrow will be better.

Current Mood: calm

I was at a house party at a house that was something like my grandmother's house in Marblehead, but not all that much. There was a hurricane going on, bad enough that we had to latch the trapdoor. I don't know WHAT trapdoor or why it was there, but it was blowing open, so we needed to latch it.

There was also a bar of some sort set up, and someone asked me for a "Smoky Winey", which I'd never heard of. She wandered off, and I guessed that it must have scotch in it, for "smoky", and some sort of wine. I chose sweet vermouth, which is technically a wine. As she'd wandered off, someone else decided to take the drink, and liked it. I commented that it was basically like a Manhattan, but with lots more vermouth. (Incidentally, I was wrong. It was basically like a Rob Roy with lots more vermouth.)

Then the woman came back, and I tried to look up "Smoky Winey" in my Bartender's Black Book. And I couldn't find it. That was the part with the nightmare feeling -- not being able to find the drink in the book with the sense of mounting horror and swirling terror. The book had somehow become over half ads, and I couldn't even find the section that even HAD drink recipes, and when I DID find it -- they petered out somewhere in the "N"s, and it didn't have the drink at all.

And THEN I saw that we had no ice. And we were running low on highball glasses! And the feeling of elemental terror increased. And I had to ask what was in a "Smoky Winey."

Turned out to be Scotch, white wine, and some third ingredient which I can't remember now -- can't even remember if it was a mixer or another liquor -- I think it was either vodka or ginger ale.

Also, there was an audition for a musical going on.

I haven't tended bar since once last September, when I was at a wedding for a friend of

lagaz,

not_the_angel, and

sokmunky. And before that, I hadn't tended bar for nearly a year.

I've been dealing with depression, of course, for all my life, and medication helps some, but it's not enough. Because, while part -- most -- of my depression is chemical and won't go away without drugs, some of it is philosophical. Working at the Hebrew School is WONDERFUL for that: I need to be doing useful work, making a contribution to society.

But it's only one day a week, so it's not enough.

Lis has been pushing me to get more work, partially because there's nothing wrong with more money, but also because she knows this about me, and wants me to be happy. So, a few days ago, I finally put together a bartending resume, and dropped off a copy at a restaurant being built on Rte. 1, which is hiring for all positions.

I'm not going to hear back from them for weeks, but it meant I had a resume. So I made a .txt version, and emailed it to every interesting-sounding opportunity on Craigslist. I applied for like six or eight jobs in ten minutes.

I got a call that night.
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So, two posts back, I mentioned that I'm teaching myself to knit. And

classics_cat said to not get discouraged since EVERYONE's first attempts at knitting suck.

It's not to worry.

See, I've got a theory. In fact, this is one of those things that I WISH people would quote me about. I mean, I come up with all these cool Laws of Nature, and name them after myself, and nobody USES them:

Xiphias's Law Of Pizza: The best pizza in the world is the stuff made at the shop right around the corner from where you grew up.

Xiphias's Law of Epistemology: That which exists is possible. (This came about after a Usenet debate in which some people mentioned that their Finnish saunas got up to 230 degrees F (110 C) and that, while you couldn't stay in TOO long, it was REALLY refreshing. Other people claimed that it was entirely impossible for people to survive when the temperature was over the boiling point of water, because the people would boil. The first group of people replied that they did it regularly, but this failed to convince the second group of people. It was for this reason that I discovered that it had to be codified -- if people do it, then people CAN do it. This seems to be a fairly difficult concept to grasp on Usenet.)

And my THIRD law: Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.

'Cause, see, if you can do something well, it's not a challenge to do it. ANYONE can do something they can do well. But if it's worth doing, it's worth doing even if you can only do it poorly.

The rule "Anything worth doing is worth doing well" is a useful rule. For big projects. But it's not terribly useful on an individual level. On the individual level, it's more important to remember that it's the DOING that's important, not the WELL.

I'm posting from home on Saturday night; I'll be going back to Boskone in the morning, but I'm sleeping here tonight. Our plan had been to stay at the youth hostel on Hemminway St, three blocks from the con, and that's where Lis is staying tonight; I'm not.

See, we wanted to demonstrate that I could stay at a youth hostel, because they're cheap. And if I could stay at youth hostels, we could potentially travel more, which would be a good outcome for Lis. So I got my hostelling card, and we tried it.

Lis had no real trouble sleeping last night. Me, however -- I count last night as among the most horrific nights of my life.
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The consumption of rich foods is correlated with severe existential angst.

If this is true, it would explain why so many of the best existentialist and nihilistic philosophers were French.

Observations? Comments? Personal experiences? Stories?

weirdjews, I came up with a quote which, the more I think about it, the more I think I'm right. I said:

There are three lasting solutions to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. One is the complete destruction of the Palestinians. Two is the complete destruction of the Israelis.

I'm in favor of the third solution.

I'll let you know if I ever figure out what it is.

Now, really, "complete destruction" doesn't necessarily mean violence or death. It means the destruction of the identity of "Palestinian" or "Israeli".

Option 2 is just plain not going to happen. The identity of "Israeli", or "Zionist" has been around since at least 1897, if not before. And if, somehow, G-d forbid, all the Jews were kicked out of Israel, and Israel ceased to exist as a modern country, there would still be Zionists. So, Option 2 isn't happening.

Option 1: as a Zionist myself, although one who frequently feels that the government of Israel is doing the wrong thing, I would love it if all the people who think of themselves as Palestinians decided that they wanted to be active participants in the modern state of Israel, and decided that, fundamentally, they are Israelis. And that would be the ideal way that we would see the destruction of "the Palestinians" as a group distinct from "the Israelis".

But that's not going to happen, either. Their entire self-definition is based on what they're NOT as much as what they ARE -- and what they're NOT is Israelis. You just can't put that down easily.

There are plenty of Arab Israelis. Arab Israelis aren't Palestinians.

I can understand this emotional reaction. As a Jew, a significant part of my self identity is "not Christian."

It sucks, because I have a lot of Christian friends, and I can respect what they do with their Christianity, and that Christianity is a positive influence in their lives. Yet, my emotional response to the word "Christian" is strongly negative. And half my own family's Christian. (Interestingly, I've got a slight positive response to "Catholic", no response whatsoever to "Protestant", and "Quaker" is strongly positive.)

I was in high school. And it was the first day of class of the year. I was in homeroom. Being 31 years old, I was the oldest person in the room except possibly the teacher.

I remember thinking, "This MUST be a dream. Because I remember GRADUATING from high school. Heck, I remember going to college! In any case, I don't live in Arlington any more, so why am I in Arlington High School?" Even so, I went around looking for my class schedule.

"Hi. I'm you're thirty-one year old self. You're going to screw up a lot in life, and also do a lot of good things. You already know everything that you SHOULD do, and you're not going to do most of it, because you're clinically depressed. And you're already being treated for clinical depression as well as you can be. So, frankly, you're fucked until medical science advances. Which it will. Oh yeah, we swear a lot more now that we used to when we were your age.

"The things you can do now are to get a lot more exercise and try to make sure to get plenty of sunlight. I know you know that you should do these things -- Mom keeps telling you that. Well, she's right. And you won't listen to me any more than you listen to her. So there's really no point in me telling you. But I am, anyway. You know all this. You should probably actually do your homework. You should probably actually get involved in drama club, or other clubs. You should probably do SOMETHING other than just sit in your room doing nothing at all, but you don't, because you're clinically depressed. If that magically went away, I could give you all sorts of suggestions of neat things to do, but they're exactly the same suggestions that you already give to yourself and can't follow because you're depressed. You know how you're always down on yourself for not being able to follow through because you've got no willpower, and that's a moral failing? That's not a lack of willpower, that's clinical depression. However, you tend to be slightly more productive, if even more unhappy, when you decide to treat it as a moral failing instead of a medical condition. So I've got no good advice for you.

( Read more... )

In my dream, I was thinking about the original Star Wars trilogy, and comparing it to the most recent three.

And I remember thinking that one of the real advantages of the original was that Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford et. al. were all much more comfortable with the musical numbers. Natalie Portman, Hayden Christiansen and all the new crew really seemed very self-conscious in the song-and-dance numbers, and that really hurt the movie. Christiansen was frankly speaking most of his lyrics, instead of singing.

And that, as much as I didn't respect Lucas as a director, I had to admit that the fact that he was willing to do his movies as musicals (largely because he was so out-of-touch with the industry that he hadn't realized that musicals Just Weren't Done Any More) was a good thing, but it meant that his cast just didn't know what to do with it, unlike in the Seventies and Eighties.

And I remember, in the dream, being a little bewildered that more reviews hadn't talked about this difference between the two casts.

Yesterday, Lis pointed out to me that a big circus tent was set up on the Topsfield Fairgrounds, right on the route to and from Lis's work. I bounced up and down and said, "Circuscircuscircuscircus!!!!"

Tonight, I went to the circus! Lis stayed home because she doesn't like circuses as much as I do, and she DOES like having the occasional evening where she can work on her computer without me annoying her and stuff.

So, let me tell you about the circus!

Okay, first, if I had it all to do over, I wouldn't have spent $2 on caramel corn, and would have spent it on upgrading from the $15 obstructed view seats to the $17 normal seats. And the clowns, on the whole, weren't that good.

I have very high expectations for clowns. I'm generally disappointed.

Anyway:

They had acrobats, and contortionist/balancers, and trapeze artists, and a magician/quick change artist (magic part was lame, quick-change stuff was NEAT -- throw a curtain around yourself for a second, and you're in a new costume! Nifty!), and TRAINED KITTY CATS (felis domestis walking on little tiny tightropes and jumping through hoops and stuff like that) and they shot a woman out of a canon, and it was just generally cool.

I like circuses.

When I was in high school, I wanted to become a clown, a professional wrestler, and/or a stuntman. I studied physical comedy and slapstick. I really wanted to be a Buster Keaton/Harold Lloyd type. My parents talked me out of it. I should have pursued it anyway.

'Cause I would have been a much better clown than most clowns out of there.

There are a couple reasons. But the most interesting is that, last night, I had an attack of angst. And how I dealt with it.

When I say, "I had an attack of angst," I am speaking in the literal Freudian sense. Last night, and the night before that, for that matter, I had sudden, sharp, intense fear that, after I die, I will not exist. Night before last, I did what I usually do -- got nauseous, shivered for a while, and then eventually managed to shove it to the back of my mind and ignore it, through intense prayer which felt absolutely pointless while I was praying, because this fear is related to and equivalent to, in my case at least, a fear that there is no G-d.

Last night, I did something different. I somehow snipped the connection between the angst and the lump of nausea and sickness beneath my ribcage. I told myself, "This lump of nausea and sickness is real -- I sense it, it is actual and sense-able. But what it is connected to -- that's a thought, and thoughts are ephemeral." And I cut the two of them apart, and wiped away the thought, and the thought vanished. The sense of fear withered and left.

But the lump of nausea, sickness, and dread remained. And is still there now, the next morning. And it doesn't MEAN anything. It's just a lump of nausea, sickness, and dread. Without connection to a cause, or a thought.

And I did not sleep at all well last night, and I feel physically terrible today.

And I find myself wondering: how much of my constant pain and sickness is old emotions floating around my body, stripped of meaning, yet retaining their pain? Is that even POSSIBLE? I wouldn't think it would be, except that I have evidence that it happened last night and is still there, and Xiphias's Law states, "That which exists is possible."

So, last night, I dreamed that I had EARLIER had a dream where I sold a collection of short stories and essays to Baen. And it was published. And it sold ONE COPY, which I had bought. . .

But, see, I dreamed that I had dreamed this dream just when I was falling asleep, and I believed it to be true. And that I'd had this dream just before Worldcon, and that I'd gone through Worldcon telling people that I was a published author. And in the dream I was having last night, I was realizing with a mounting sense of horror that I'd been lying to people. Because the whole thing about writing and selling a book and having it published, was, in the dream, only a dream.

So I was dreaming about having to tell people that I'd been lying to them, and, in various parts of the dream, different friends were helping me deal with it.

It was a strange and disturbing dream about having a dream and thinking it was real.

It being the beginning of a new month, I finally re-signed up at the gym, where I haven't been in, like, a year. And I did a (very) light workout.

And I feel better than I have in a long time.

The nice weather has something to do with that, too.

But I feel like my whole life has sort of turned into a giant tangled snarled knotted mess, and going to the gym is the first step in taking a pin and teasing one of the strings out.

I mean, my body's in such bad shape that I can't do things, which makes my emotions all a mess, which saps my ability to get my body together. . .

But not any more. Today's the day that changes. I can feel it.

If I'm ever in a situation more or less like that one . . . do whatever brings the most comfort to the people around me.

If it brings people comfort to have me able to vaguely track a ball across the room, or something like that, keep me in that state. If that's painful, and it would be more comforting to have me properly dead and finished, do that.

In a dispute between my spouse and my parents or my sister, my spouse gets final say. She's the one who lives with me, she's the one who holds me when I wake up out of a sound sleep equally terrified of death and of losing my mind. Those are my nightmares.

So, let's face it. It would be a choice between which nightmare I would face. And, well, it doesn't really matter. They're both nightmares. So -- given that I'd hate both choices, let the choice be made on what would help others more.

At some point, I'll post about how adorable my nephew in Florida is, and how he ate his first birthday cake. But not right now.

For once, it doesn't feel like just plain chemical depression. It feels like it's got a cause.
( Cut for your mental sanitation. )

( Feel free to skip: this is here mainly for my own reference, but feel free to read, if it interests you. )

There are a lot of good things about working Massage Den, of course. One of them is that, well, I like giving massages. Otherwise I wouldn't work Massage Den. And, well, it's really nice having a universally appreciated job. I mean, people see the staff ribbon on my badge, and ask where I'm working, and I say "Massage Den", and they really seem pleased that such a thing exists. That's cool. And Crystal does do her damnedest to make sure that we all don't burn out. I'm just grumpy because I'm usually grumpy after cons.

There's something about the particular way in which I'm introverted which doesn't work well with cons. I mean, I'm people-needy, in general -- I need social contact. With, specifically, the kinds of people who go to cons. And so I've got this feeling like there are all these people around me who I SHOULD be interacting with, and I don't. Mostly, at cons, I spend a lot of time wandering around aimlessly. That's one of the reasons I'm really glad to work Massage Den, because it structures a lot of my time, leaving me with less aimless wandering time.

But it also means that I've got less time to do whatever it is that I go to cons to do, even though I've never quite figured out whatever that is, which is why I spend that time wandering aimlessly, looking for whatever it is.

Friday night, went to company party with Lis. Got to meet her co-workers. Liked them -- Lis has nice co-workers. Actually had fun at company party. Wasn't Arisia, but was fun anyway.

Saturday, went to Arisia, showed up at 11. Spent from 11 to 1 in Massage Den giving massages. Met Lis after 1 at a panel, which went until 2. Was an okay panel -- it was the Shakespeare panel. The people who run the Shakespeare panel keep suggesting that Lis should be on it, too, but she always demurs. Dunno why. Got food at 2, and breifly wandered around the dealer's room and the art show. Got back to Massage Den at 3. Found out that I had been supposed to be there at 2, which was when I'd gotten food, but hadn't been told that. Spent from 3 to 5 giving massages. At 5, left massage den, and wandered around to see people. Wandered around Dealer's Row. Hung out with

vonbeck a bit. Wandered into gopher hole, gave chair massage to person there. Got food. Went back to Massage Den from 7 to 9 to give massages. At 9, wandered back downstairs to see if I could catch any of Masquerade. Masquerade was over by then, and they were showing trailers while judges were out judging. Got to see a couple trailers, and saw the judging for Masquerade. At 11, headed out to party-hop. Nothing really grabbed me as far as parties went, saw a couple people in halls, went home at 1.

Blizzard going on. Considered taking train back in for Sunday. Would have been reasonably safe, but fairly unpleasant. Called Crystal and asked if they could do without me.

Total time at Arisia this year: 14 hours.

Of those 14 hours:
7 hours giving massages
1 hour at a panel that didn't particularly interest me, but I said I'd meet Lis there.
2 hours finding food
1 hour looking at dealer room, art show, &ct.
2 hours wandering around looking at parties.
1 hour kind of randomly wandering the halls

How is it that I can spend 7 hours giving massages, and end up feeling drained and touch-deprived?

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Bartender Geek

pedagogy and rhetoric a specialty

(no subject)

(no subject)

I had the weirdest nightmare.

Bartending stuff, and lack-of-depression.

About knitting, and just doing stuff in general

Hostel experiment was successful, in that it disproved a hypothesis

A hypothesis

So, I came up with a pithy quote

I had one of those weird anxiety dreams. . .

What I would say to my ten-year-old, or twelve-year-old, or sixteen-year-old self.

I just remembered a tiny bit of a dream I had last night

Circus!

I feel awful this morning

I've been having such weird, vivid dreams recently

Today's been a good day so far.

Because I've been thinking about the Terri Schiavo case. . .

Feeling rather down. Okay, very down.

More musings on depression

(no subject)

My Arisia con report, such as it is.

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November 2018

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