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March 2012

Randomly Friday afternoon

At the end of a mildly insomniac week, I find myself on the verge of dropping off to sleep in the midst of this daylong data curation workshop. I think my whole table has pretty much moved on now and is surfing, tweeting, and sometimes even just openly conversing, but there’s an hour yet to go.

Things I’ve learned during the workshop:

A thousand pardons

Another navel-gazing bit of self-analysis that may or may not ever be published.

I need help.

I can’t really think of any way my life has benefited from the events of the past year. It’s been, without question, the most miserable, soul-sucking, spirit-crushing time I’ve ever been through. I’m pissed off and resentful and sad and sometimes just plain shell-shocked. It’s affecting the way I interact (or don’t interact) with other people. It’s starting to affect my everyday life and keep me from doing what I want and need to do. Since I don’t seem to be able to fix it myself, I’m arriving at the decision that I may need some help.

Depression and resentment have been the big themes of my life for a year now. I’m depressed because pretty much no part of my life looks the way I expected it to back in 2010 when (for the first time in my life, in many ways) I dared to envision a future for myself–one that involved a new job that I loved (another first) and being together with a partner that I loved even more. If maybe not a sense of adventure, I definitely had a sense of contentment, as if the life I’d been hoping for and working for and planning for was about to start happening.

Then it all went to hell. I still had the job, but the life together was over. And to this day, I still don’t quite understand why. That’s how dense I am. All I have left is a lot of memories of how things were and reminders of how things no longer are. The memories make me avoid things I used to love–little things like the fair, Baskin Robbins, Star Trek, etc. The reminders are more sinister: a mortgage I can’t afford to pay on a house I can’t sell and don’t want to own anymore, the loneliness and anxiety I feel when I wake up at 4AM and can’t get back to sleep…

Just when I thought I was seeing some daylight (and maybe I was fooling myself) came all the stuff with my mom, which not only made me more depressed, but also emphasized how empty my life was and how little chance it seemed I was going to have to do anything about it now that I’d accepted a second full-time job managing every aspect of my parents’ lives–which was a bit ironic considering how poorly I’d managed my own. This pretty much sucked out whatever remaining joy I was finding in life at this point, replacing it with dread, panic, and almost constant stress.

And this was when the depression and general “wounded” tone began to add that dimension of resentment. This resentment was basically built around my feeling that almost every aspect of my life had been adversely affected (turned upside down, really) due to other people’s issues–based on things I essentially had no control over and no say in. Of course Mark didn’t start out with the goal of making my life miserable and he in fact has done all he could to make things easier, both financially and emotionally. My parents obviously didn’t lose the ability to handle their own affairs just to spite me. That the timing was so bad was just an unfortunate coincidence. But I resented it all just the same. And even though I know that when you have relationships, you share problems, I felt that most of my problems were not of my own making.

Frankly, I think I have some justification for both emotions given the constant assault of the past year or so. But that doesn’t mean it’s a healthy way to live. In fact, it probably borders on lethal. It’s caused a tremendous strain on my relationship with my parents and has made it very challenging for Mark and me to keep a fragile friendship alive. I want my parents to take care of their own stuff and leave me the hell alone. And every time Mark starts talking about his plans for the future, I want to scream and say, “I could have some exciting plans for the future too, but I don’t have the luxury of just walking away and sating ‘I don’t like my life anymore.’ You get to go have fun and do what you want while I get to pick up the pieces of what we were supposedly building together.”

The problem is that I’m having a hard time seeing any happiness in my future. That’s a dangerous place to be, and one that I’m not sure I can (or should) get out of alone.

Change gotta come

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And soon. I’m putting myself on notice.

“Self,” I said to myself tonight, “at some point, you have to get past the fact that everything sucks. Even though it’s not really your fault that everything sucks and even though much of your suckage is not of your own making, you still have to take responsibility for fixing your own life because no one else is going to do it. Constant depression, frustration, and resentment–even when justified–are not terribly attractive and definitely aren’t a healthy part of a balanced breakfast.”

Jeez, I sound like a bad self-help book when I talk to myself like this…

I didn’t ask to be born

I didn’t ask to be born. Sounds like something you’d hear a pouting, sullen teenager say but there’s actually some truth to it.

Sidney Poitier’s speech to his dad in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was perhaps a more palatable version. Paraphrased, he says that when people make a conscious choice to have children, they bear the responsibility for those children–at least until they’re no longer children. The kids, on the other hand, do not have a similar moral obligation to their parents because they made no such choice or commitment.

Of course, that’s not a license to write off Mom and Dad when they become inconvenient or annoying. It would take a pretty rotten son to do that, assuming the parents were loving and took care of him. But it does suggest that the children maybe shouldn’t feel quite so guilty if they don’t drop everything and devote their entire lives to caring for their aging parents.

Yes, I’m talking about myself and my parents and my need to set ground rules and boundaries. I’m obviously going to do what I can do for them. I am not, however, going to give up my own life (career, sanity, etc.) in the process. Many people have that nurturing instinct and can spend hours patiently caring for and entertaining and just generally enjoying older people. I am not one of those people. I do not have that instinct, even toward the parents I very much love. That’s why I had the presence of mind not to have children. Call me selfish, but I’m only willing to devote so much of my time to this.

I’m not going to move in with my dad. I’m not going to visit my mom every day. I’m not going to drive thirty miles each way to Greensboro every single weekend after already doing it five days a week too. I’m not going to give up vacations. And I’m not going to sleep with my phone turned on and resting on the night table waiting for a crisis.

Of course I’m going to visit regularly and spend time with them. And I’m fully willing to manage the business end of things. I’m more inclined to succeed at what I can do well that fail at what I know I don’t do well at all. Does that make me a bad person? Tough. At least I recognize my limitations.

Hmmm….

I just texted a friend trying to say that I needed a bit of advice. Whatever I actually typed autocorrected to “I need a bit of vice.”

Is my phone now making my Freudian slips for me?

On a Thursday night

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Just a note to anyone who has been trying to catch me for the past two days: it’s been very hectic and I’m quite exhausted, as evidenced by the fact that it’s 8:45 and I’m just about to go to bed. But the climate seems to be improving as the weekend approaches. So fear not. There will be sarcasm and Canadian indie rock (maybe even in French) and an a new rant on how fucking annoying it is to be told to “have a blessed day.”

Unless I decide to do something else, that is.

Bless this, asshole

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One of the hazards of everyday life in the South (and increasingly in other regions of this ever so devout country, I’m told) is constantly being told by restaurant and retail employees to “have a ‘blessed’ day.” It used to be something that came mostly from the mouths of older African American church ladies but it’s becoming rather ubiquitous. I do not find it sweet nor endearing. I find it off-putting and insulting.

It’s a little like telling someone to have an “orange” day–not  really grammatically incorrect, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either. Grammar (and triteness) aside, though, this little greeting is pretty much just a passive aggressive way of introducing religion into inappropriate situations. Cashiers and servers who would be fired or disciplined for saying things that are more overtly religious to their customers feel they can get away with this allegedly more subtle form of proselyting. And they’re right, unfortunately. As a rule, Muslims, Buddhists, and humanists generally do not tell you to have a “blessed” day. This is specifically an evangelical Christian thing. And it’s bad customer service because it involves pushing religion in my face in situations where it doesn’t belong.

Besides, don’t evangelical Christians believe that we are all “blessed” pretty much by default, just by virtue of the fact that a merciful god has allowed us poor wretches to exist in his presence? Isn’t it sort of redundant to tell people to have a “blessed” day when you believe they pretty much can’t help but to be having one already? Isn’t it sort of like telling them to “breathe air?” Yes. That’s precisely it. The only reason, it seems, that a Christian would ever tell someone to have a “blessed” day is (1) to make damned sure the poor slob being so greeted knew that that the person offering the greeting was a Christian, and (2) to hint ever so slightly that the “greetee” might want to concentrate on his own faith just to make sure he recognizes the tenuousness of his relationship with the man upstairs.

In other words, to do a little preaching.

In an inappropriate place like with your customers in a restaurant or a store.

See paragraph #2 above.