Obscenities

tendons break, joints creak
scalpel carves continually
caustic uncontrol

*sigh* Don had to have his knee operated on again. It had been coming along well, though he had complained of a sort of indent where he wondered if a tendon had come loose again. So no taiji tomorrow, and no idea about next week. He still sounded groggy on the phone, but that's rather understandable.

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Lightning, or Something...

I may have more to say about the rest of the trip later, but we just got back. We drove something like 640 miles today. I expected my mom would want to stop in Rock Springs; she didn't. Then I figured she'd give out at Kemmerer: nope. We made it back at about 9:30 pm, just as it was starting to get dark. I think we were both sick of hotels and wanted to be in our own beds.

Anyway, that has little to do with this post, other than the events occurred on the trip. I suspect that if it weren't for the ruddy "terminal" notification, the only result would have been a wave of regretful nostalgia, which would have been over almost instantly. But being under stress already, something just snapped inside me when we were in Grand Lake. The moment itself was more one of shock (mixed in with other stuff), but afterwards it felt as if something had broken loose, snapped, inside me.

There was a little bit of buildup to it: nothing major, nothing that one might expect to lead to someone snapping: my mom hates miniature golf, and I've always loved it. There's a miniature golf course in Grand Lake, and we walked by it, and I jokingly suggested we could play. It would have been better, I think, if she'd just said "no." Instead, she came up with all sorts of convoluted garbage suggestions, including that I "adopt" one of the little kids already playing to play with. At that moment, I was annoyed, but otherwise fine.

Then we finished walking down the one major street of Grand Lake, and drove down to the lake itself. There were kids out learning to sail, people in rented pedal-boats, kids building sand castles: pretty typical of the place. What wasn't typical was that I was suddenly angry. Not with the people there, not even with my mom in particular, but just angry. It took me a while to figure out why. I have always, always, wanted to rent one of those pedal-boats, or take a sail-boat out, or...or any number of things, and I've never had an actual opportunity. My mom won't consider any activity even remotely physical, and, when my dad was saner, he just thought it was a waste of time.

It was like the day just died before my eyes, right then and there. I turned around and walked back to the car without saying a word, and, more unusually, without even taking any pictures of or around the lake. It took me the better part of two days to get over that feeling of emptiness and isolation. For whatever reason, the drive back home helped quite a bit, as did a hike later in the same day. On the hike, it occurred to me that there might be a career option open to me that would let me do things that I love while maintaining most of my freedom. I don't know if a year is enough to establish myself sufficiently to make a living at it, but I'd like to try: photography. Most of the later events that helped clear the angry fog revolved around light and color and imagery, too, so I think there may actually be something there. I might also just be going insane, but it's better than feeling like a rather large chunk of scar tissue has been ripped out of my heart and a piece of leather nailed in its place.

So that was my last two days. Time will tell if that was a useful thought I had after having my heart ripped open or just a desperate grab for something to hold onto.

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Insert Suitable Disaster Cliché

Well, I was having a pretty decent birthday yesterday. Then my mom found a little notice in my mailbox that I had some certified mail waiting for me at the post office. Foolishly, I went to pick it up. It was from ISU. My 2009-2010 contract will be terminal, meaning that, "barring a change in administration"*, I do not have a job after spring semester 2010 ends.

So... now I have to find something else that will keep the bills paid. I was freaking out yesterday until it occurred to me that there was an interestingly ironic option available: apply for a D.A. fellowship and actually get my doctorate. I'm still not entirely sure I want it, but it's a fallback plan if nothing else materializes. Another fallback plan would be to get certified to teach high school, but for that I need to talk to a guy in the department who knew exactly which classes someone with an extant master's degree needed for that.

My reactions have varied from disgust to terror to anger to, oddly, relief. The fact is that I'm a bit sick of what I've been doing. A break, even a forced break, might be a good thing. So long as I'm still able to keep the bills paid, anyway. Looking at the D.A. requirements, it will take at least 2 years, if I max out to 12 credits each semester, 3 years if I stick with the saner 9 credits. I won't be making as much, but I survived on the master's level stipend for several years, so I should be able to manage.

I'm still going to be checking job sites and such, and if I can grab something with full benefits that pays at least what I'm making now, I'll probably take it. INL is one potential option, and they are currently hiring people, but at this moment none of the positions are ones I can take. Unless someone wants to teach me to weld, stat. At this point, if something comes along that pays well and starts before my ISU contract expires, I might just be tempted to get out of the damn contract.

*I went to ask someone exactly what "terminal" meant, and he kept using the phrase "barring a change in administration." I sort of want to think this means that a change is likely, and if the rest of what I was told is accurate, there may be a mass riot soon. Apparently every contract lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences got one of two letters: terminal or temporary. Terminal means your contract will not be renewed, period. Temporary means it might be renewed, if they feel like it. Now, at least half of the lower level classes at ISU are taught by contract lecturers, more than half in the math department. They're essentially saying that they don't give a damn if we come back or not. I realize that they're trying to get out of paying benefits, but I guarantee you that if they don't change their tune soon, they won't have any contract-lecturers left. They're probably hoping that some of us "terminals" will accept a part-time job, with no benefits. I'd like the chance to tell them exactly what they can do with their part-time jobs...

As for me, I'm sort of crossing my fingers that it's all a bad dream (and I suddenly have a rather literal appreciation for that phrase), but I'm feeling better now that I do have a fallback plan. I would be surprised if I did not get accepted into the D.A. program if I applied, and that would give me a few years breathing room. I'm not ready to leave Pocatello just yet. The other fallback plan is to try again to publish a book... thing is that most authors don't actually make enough to live on from their books. There are the top-tenners, and then there's everyone else. *shrugs*

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Depressive Stigmas

What happens if I don't take my medication? I turn into a zombie. Everything turns flat, it seems almost as if things lose their color, like all the colors fade. I feel like my body weighs so much that I can't even hold my shoulders up. I become lethargic - I can't get myself to do anything. I don't feel sad; I feel nothing. Empty, blank, flat. Great things can happen, but they don't make me happy. Awful things can happen, but they don't make me sad.

What happens when I take my medication? I'm myself again. The medication doesn't make me feel happy; it makes me feel. With the medication, my emotions come back; I can feel happy or sad. I enjoy it when things are going well; I get sad or angry when they go poorly.

~MarkCC @ Good Math, Bad Math

I seem to have made it through my bout with depression, amazingly without the aid of pharmaceuticals. Some would say that makes me "better" than people who need the pharmaceuticals; I would say it makes me damned lucky. I've talked to people who actually think that all you need to do if you're depressed is "snap out of it." It's obvious that such people have never, ever suffered from genuine depression. They've had the "oh, I'm a bit down today" variety.

In my case, I was able to keep functioning through sheer effort of will, but I didn't give much of a damn about anything. The place where this manifested most obviously was in getting bills paid. I would know that the bill was sitting there, that I had the money in my checking account to pay for it, that the checkbook was under the bill...and I could not motivate myself to get up and do anything about it. I managed to push through that often enough to avoid losing anything other than cable...mainly because none of the other companies were as ridiculously uptight about late payments as the cable company. One of the signs that the depression was lifting was when I would sit down almost immediately after receiving a bill and get it paid.

Here's the thing, though. I didn't use pharmaceuticals, but I did use a meditation practice. Meditation has been shown to alter brain states. Instead of taking a drug to alter my brain chemistry, I adopted a practice that would do so. I tended to keep with practices that seemed to improve the condition, but it was largely a matter of trial and error. I can't see how that is "better" than using a pharmaceutical to achieve the same effect. Such a practice is a major time commitment, and has to be done everyday if you want to keep receiving benefits. The pharmaceuticals are a hefty monetary commitment instead, and have to be ingested everyday to receive benefits. Which have you got more of, time or money? And do you have enough patience to give a meditative practice time to work?

I do think there are further benefits to a meditation practice, particularly one that utilizes physical meditations like taiji and yoga, and I do think everyone could benefit from such practices. But I am not about to tell someone who is so depressed that he/she can't get out of bed to go do yoga asanas. Pharmaceuticals would be a much better option at that point. Maybe, maybe, after the pharmaceuticals have helped enough, such a practice might reduce dependence on them, but, then again, it might not. Whether it's worth trying is entirely up to the person who is suffering.

In my case, since the meditation practice works for me, I prefer to rely on that. It doesn't require a doctor's visit or a prescription. It does require a strong commitment to the practice. Most people who are depressed wouldn't be able even to contemplate such a commitment. When I began it, my goal was to keep it up for 36 days straight, and that was all. Just 36 days. I did not expect to make it through those 36 days, but it gave me a goal to concentrate on. Rather to my amazement, I made it through 36 days, then 108, and I've just passed the 900 day mark. That's 25 cycles of 36 days, when I didn't honestly expect to make it through a single cycle of 36 days. I've even expanded the practice since then. But, that's me. That's not going to work for everyone, any more than a single pharmaceutical remedy is going to work for everyone. It helps that I'm a touch obsessive-compulsive and have a fascination with numbers, so that counting the days actually served to motivate me when I began. Now I still keep track of the numbers, but it's more a matter of interest than of motivation.

But what if that hadn't worked for me? What if I hadn't lucked into a practice sufficient to keep me sane? I don't know. Best case scenario, I think, would be that I wound up on some sort of pharmaceutical. Worst case? I don't think I would have suicided, as the only time I felt suicidal it was ginger-induced*, but I might have gotten to the point of not giving a damn about anything, including the job that pays my bills, or the cars coming on a street I needed to cross, or... One way or another, the situation would have gotten worse and worse.

*I've determined that if I'm perfectly awake and healthy, ginger just makes me a touch sleepy. If I'm already tired, ginger makes me feel depressed. If I'm already depressed, it can make me feel suicidal. I no longer cook with ginger.

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Heavy Damn Sigh

***NOTE: I am irrationally angry at this point, and some of the language below reflects that. Do not read further if this is likely to offend you.***

I mentioned a while back that my taiji teacher had slipped on the ice and hurt some stuff around his left knee. The MRI came back clean; it looked like he'd just overstretched some muscles. A week ago Tuesday, they decided it wasn't healing up well enough and went in for a physical look. Several tendons as well as part of the quad were torn. Either the MRI missed them, or the regimen of physical therapy he was on did more damage than good. It's impossible to tell at this point. Another confounding factor is that his rheumatoid arthritis medication apparently weakens the tendons. So now he's stuck in a wheelchair for the next four weeks, at which point they'll take another look and find out if he can put any weight on it yet. In modern parlance, the knee's fucked.

He's taking it better than I would, or else he's impressively good at putting a positive face on. He's been working on as much of the form as he can while trapped in a goddamn wheelchair, and working out how to get around with the thing. Melissa and I helped him up the ramp into his dojo; he's mostly been practicing elsewhere because it's too much work to get the bloody thing in there.

I'm sick of seeing him get worse and worse. I'm sick to bloody death of it. And I have nothing else coherent to say.

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Awakening

three years dead
I walked the hills a corpse
trapped in my own head
Blackened crust of a heart
glowed crimson through the cracks,
trickling, breathing pain
Numbness welcomed: dead in life,
desolate, drained, dazed

Awakening...
Awakening...
Awakening...hurts.

The first part is a description of how I felt shortly after my grandma's death. The awakening...has come in stages. I'm sort of hoping that I've come through it all now. Being numb gets old. Fast.

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Twilight Poem

It's poetry Sunday at Daylight Atheism. The poem this time has some good thoughts and imagery, but at first I didn't care for what I took to be a lack of texture. Now that I re-read it, I realize that the texture is that of a whispering desert night, and I like it much better with that realization. Two short excerpts below:

The sea of sage-brush, breaking against the purple hills far away.
And white alkali-flats, which shimmer in the mirage as beautiful blue lakes, constantly retreating.
The mirage paints upon the sky, rivers with cool, willowy banks;
You can almost hear the lapping of the water,
But they flee mockingly, leaving the thirsty to perish.
...
The Desert cares no more for the death of the tribes than for the death of the armies of black crawling crickets.
Silence. Invincible. Impregnable. Compelling the soul to stand forth to be questioned.
Dazzling in the sun, whiter than snow, I see the bones
Of those who have existed as I now exist. The bones are here; where are they who lived?

~Charles Erskine Scott Wood

Those last four lines come eerily close to thoughts I have been having recently. Yet I remain unconvinced that the physical world is all that there is. I don't know what else there is, nor if that "else" is reachable by human beings. Three things stop me from drawing the curtain over the possibility. (1) A voice I heard after my Great Grandma's death. Not a clear voice, just a barest whisper. It came once and never again. I certainly could have imagined it, or it could have been an odd conjunction of real sounds that somehow combined into my name. But I remain uncertain. (2) More recently, the sight of my grandma's body. I saw it, and knew instantly that "she" was not there. Whatsoever she had been was no longer in that body. Mayhap it simply vanishes at death, yet... *shrugs* (3) The I-Ching. It is very strange to feel you're having a conversation with a book, yet that is what the I-Ching provides me. Perhaps the conversation is only with my own subconscious interpretations of the words ... yet I remain uncertain.

None of those instances are meant to convince anyone else, only to lay out the basis for my own thinking. I have no firm conclusion either direction, except, perhaps, calling out anyone who claims certainty as a charlatan. All things return to That-Which-Is... do any of them return in a form recognizable to those from whom they have departed, or even recognizable to whatever is left of their "selves"? That I cannot answer. But in my more relaxed moments, I cannot help but think, "To die would be an awfully big adventure." (~Peter Pan, Hook) (Note: it's not an adventure I have any wish to rush into, in case I just worried anyone. But it is interesting to wonder why those who claim to know what lies beyond also have no wish to rush there...)

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The Little Things in Life...

At Mind Hacks' weekly roundup I found a link to this article, discussing what it takes for people to become happier over time. The conclusion?

However, improvement may not come from major events such as winning the lottery, despite the seemingly life-changing nature of such examples. Rather it seems like the key for long lasting changes to well-being is to engage in activities that provide small and frequent boosts, which in the long run will lead to improved well-being, one small step at a time.

I find this of particular interest because it handily explains how my decision to engage in a daily practice of taiji and meditation was able to pull me out of the deep depression I found myself in after my grandma died. It gave me a "small boost" each day, and, over time, those boosts resulted in a lasting difference. Time helped, too, of course, but I'm honestly not sure I would have made it through the worst of it without that daily practice. I don't think I would have suicided, but I suspect that I would have gotten to the point of not being able to function. Sure, there are medications out there that might have helped, but I'll take meditation over meds any day.

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Comforting Fictions

There are few things more insidious than "hope." We think of it as a positive attribute, in the main, but that does not hold up under examination. For every person who allows futile hope to pull them through a rough patch, there are probably ten others who keep pushing on to their detriment.

It's especially insidious in the face of insufficient information. Take notions of the afterlife. Primarily, I think, they are less about comforting people in the face of their own death and more about comforting survivors after a loss. I find myself in the position of inventing a comforting fiction to keep myself from going mad and spending every moment in an almost certainly useless search.

It is extremely unlikely that Jacques is alive. I have checked and rechecked at the pound, called for him throughout my neighborhood, and kept my eyes open on the walk between home and campus. Nothing. If I allow myself to dwell on that near-certainty, I am overcome with guilt for failing to protect him. If I take a step back and allow the slim possibility that he got lost and was taken in by someone else, I can function. Regardless of how unlikely it is, allowing a small irrational part of my mind to accept that fiction keeps me, to a rough approximation, sane. Without a body to bury, it is not an impossible fiction, but it is still nothing more than an invented story.

As for an afterlife, that is an even more elaborate fiction. I find traditional notions of it completely ridiculous and at odds with the supposedly "real world". But their purpose is not to make sense. It is not even so much to comfort. The purpose, I now think, is to allow them to move on. Keep the comforting fiction at the back of the mind so that they can function in their daily lives. Problems come when they forget that it is nothing more than a comforting fiction. I am not claiming that an afterlife is impossible: just that it has exactly as much evidence as I have for thinking that Jacques could still be alive.

*This post was originally title "Futility" until I noticed that my last post on a similar topic was also titled that. Consistency, eh?

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Silences

At the moment, I'm the only one coming to Saturday taiji practice. Largely because of this, I think, Don's agreed to teach me the taiji saber form. It's not a Cheng Man-Ch'ing form, but it's interesting. It's also weird that some of the moves feel like I'm remembering them from somewhere else... I have no idea if that actually means anything, but I'd like to think it means I was, say, a samurai or some such in a former life. The katana isn't quite the same as the saber (some pictures and links here), but they're both curved and single-edges, so I'm sure there's at least some overlap in usage.


The house is too quiet. Jacques was(?) the most vocal of all the cats. Best case scenario, someone took him in. It's unlikely that happened the night he went missing, though. It would have been between 10 pm and 4 am. So that entails the assumption that he got himself lost, then got taken in. We checked at the pound yesterday. No luck. When I was driving around through the nearby alleys and streets, I saw a yard with a cat trap, so I started to hope that he'd just gotten himself trapped and impounded.

The thing that I notice is that I'm still functioning. I wasn't really after Grandma died. It was something like automatic pilot at that point. Things needed to be done, and they got done, and I have little memory of how.

I just keep expecting to come home, and find him in the garden or on the porch... *sighs*

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Ranting

Item 1: I hate meetings where everything that we really need to know is already written down...and we spend two hours going over it anyway.

Item 2: Apparently the Virginia Tech incident has resulted in some odd policy changes regarding doors. All rooms must easily unlock from the inside. So the doors must not only open from the inside, they must unlock. Which seems okay...except that the one on the Math 108 center cannot now be closed and stay locked. If you close it, it unlocks. Thankfully, the other door does not have this unsecurity device on it, as it's a keypad lock. Supposedly the entire physical science building will be getting these unsecurity devices at some point. Hopefully they figure out how to make the things stay locked when necessary by then. Random thought: such doors may violate insurance policies on computer labs...


Item 3: Jacques is missing. He wanted to play Wednesday night, so I went to bed. He never came and meowed at the window to be let in. I haven't seen him since. I have no idea what happened to him. I've driven up and down all the streets around here, checked at the pound and left a picture and phone number. There's not a whole hell of a lot else I can do (except get him microchipped if he ever makes it back, along with all of his sibs and mom). *tries not to punch a hole in the desk*

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Annoying Day

Most annoying, I'm not sure why. I've been having cold chills and mood swings which seem to be connected. Not particularly severe mood swings, as they're the kind I can step back from and watch without much difficulty, but still annoying. That's the reason for the bevy of quizzes: distraction. I don't know if it's a cold, a response to my first large quantity of chocolate in several weeks, off-kilter hormonal fluctuations, a reaction to phenylephrine (most recent replacement of pseudoephedrine; only tried it this week), or something else entirely. It seems to have lifted somewhat at the moment.

However, I will say that Dexter is a good antidote to intermittent minor depression. I found the entire first season at Wal-Mart (yes--wal-mart--on a Sunday--don't ask--ICK). I'd already missed a few eps, as I tend to forget that there's actually something to watch on Sunday nights, so it's been handy to catch up. And I was half-wrong about the editing for tv. Yes, they edited out language. Not really any nudity thusfar, which is surprising given that it's a Showtime series. They did edit the scenes with Dexter carving up his victims, and cut out some of the in-station subplots that didn't directly involve Dexter. The last was most likely an issue of timing rather than rating.

I think, though, that the episode that aired tonight has to be my favorite so far. Several high-profile women who committed suicide in the same way had the same therapist...so Dexter goes to therapy! He finds it surprisingly helpful, to the point that he almost regrets killing the guy. Almost. Favorite line: "I can't kill him tonight; I need another therapy session."

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Two Years

I slept on the sofa
And did not sleep
But roused fitfully
Too soon called up.

Too frail to stand, to walk...
Yet Grandma breathed.
Once more we carried her
Back to her bed.

Fearfully wakened by
Mom's tear-stained face:
Grandma's body empty,
Already cold.

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—ing Alzheimer's...

Via Pharyngula, and reminded by John, it seems that Terry Pratchett is showing signs of early onset Alzheimer's. However, he aten't dead yet, and it sounds like he's going to put up the best fight he can. And I love his attitude:

I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as 'I am not dead'. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else. For me, this maybe further off than you think - it's too soon to tell. I know it's a very human thing to say "Is there anything I can do", but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.

So, any high-end experts in brain chemistry reading? If so, I instruct thee to hie to the Master Talecrafter's side. `/^

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Lyrical Madness

This morning, I had a song from Sweeney Todd stuck in my head, so I went to look up the lyrics. It's amazing what people can misspell and mis-hear. Anyway, this is the bit that was in my head (I fixed the typos I was sure about, but there may be some I missed; so far all three sites have identical errors):

There's a hole in the world like a great black pit
and the vermin of the world inhabit it
and its morals aren't worth what a pig can spit
and it goes by the name of London.
At the top of the hole sit the privileged few
Making mock of the vermin in the lower zoo
turning beauty to filth and greed...
I too have sailed the world and seen its wonders,
for the cruelty of men is as wondrous as Peru
but there's no place like London!

The weirdest mistake is here: "The lady, sir, did she, sir, come?" This should be: "The lady, Sir, did she succumb?" It makes no sense whatsoever the first way. I'll have to check the lyrics book that came with my CD's and see if it was printed wrong there.

At any rate, you might guess that a pleasant mood would not put a song like this into one's head. It would be accurate to say that it's been a less than pleasant week, for a variety of reasons. Working on homicidal bots (the chatting kind; not the mechanical kind) is therapeutic.

On the plus side, I did get all my mom's new office furniture put together, and started moving desks around between the two sides of the building on Wednesday. Her boss's old desk wouldn't fit through the doors until we took the legs off and turned it sideways. We also got the desk that I'm getting moved out of the main office area, without dismantling it, and rearranged some of the stuff that IS staying in the main office area. That part of the week was good. There was one thing Mom forgot to have me help with before I took off...and I can't for the life of me remember what it was, now, but we're mostly done.

Wednesday overall was a good day, actually. At College Market, we discussed Hamlet, with connections to the Euthydemus, Jungian archetypes, and anything else that came to mind. That was fun.


It's just that when you feel like you're balancing on the edge of a knife, it doesn't take whole hell of a lot to throw you off. So... I'm at the point where I could really do with an explosion or twenty. I just want to see something blow up, preferably at close range. If it could be an ISU building (preferably empty), that would be a bonus, but I'd settle for even a miniature replica. Actually, I think I'd be happy with a simulated explosion, so long as it was sufficiently graphic. Might be a good time to watch the new James Bond movie. Surely SOMETHING gets blown up in it.

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Trickster

trickster rides
the knife edge between
pain and rage

Explanation: Yeah, I'm getting minor twitches of holiday blues this year, but I made an interesting discovery this summer. There's an unstable equilibrium between the pain of utter depression and the rage when it turns outward. I finally figured out a description for it tonight: tricksterism. It's a bit dicey to stay there, but it beats the alternative.

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Philosophy Non-class

Not much to report from class itself, as we closed up with the gospel on Monday, had a test on Wednesday, and just started philosophical religion on Friday. The test wasn't too bad. We had five essay topics and had to write on two of them. Hopefully my handwriting was legible enough... On the chalkboard, I've gotten pretty good at legibility. On paper...well...

The first question I wrote on was discussing the roles of earth and sky in modern religions. Sky is seen as the distant creator god. Earth is seen as the more accessible mother goddess. Generally speaking; there are cultures who reverse the genders. I mainly took it in terms of abstraction vs. tangibility. The sky aspects are hard to get hold of, while the earth ones are more immediate and tangible.

The second gave a list of figures we'd discussed and had us compare any two of them. The list was Taoist Sage, Krishna, Hebrew Prophet and Jesus. Dr. Levenson had used Krishna as a contrast to Christ several times, so I didn't want to write on those. That left Hebrew Prophet and Taoist Sage. Mainly I discussed their differing personalities with regard to their respective deities (or views of deity). Short version: the Hebrew prophet is antagonistic and angry, belittling to his people, and foreseeing a bad outcome unless they mend their ways; the Taoist Sage is calm and self-effacing, aware of when the people fall short, and guiding them without forcing them. The Taoist Sage acts in such a way that people will believe they have figured things out for themselves. Revelation is rather antithetical to this.

...

On Friday, Jen and I discussed suffering and pain some more. I get the impression she's had a rough life, based on the few specific details she's mentioned. Dr. Levenson had given her a sheet of notes that he thought she might find interesting, and we went over it together. One of the first ideas that came up is this notion that depression is something people can just "get over." Poof. Snap. Done. Bull. I can say with certainty that no one who thinks that has ever been clinically depressed, and Jen was right with me on that. Worse, it's almost considered taboo to admit to depression. You should soldier on, grin and bear it, etc.

Depression is...pain. Near-constant pain. Sometimes it disappears for a few minutes, and then when it returns it seems that much worse for the respite. Occasionally it dulls to numbness and that's worse. It's possible to function through the pain, but the numbness numbs you to everything, making it hard to care about anything at all. Getting things done when you don't give a damn is damn near impossible. Finding a way out is even harder. There, the pain is much preferable; it gives you an impetus to find a way out. I found my own way out, but I would bet that there are plenty of people who are incapable of doing so without help.

...

Then there was a philosophy club meeting discussing religion. Dr. Levenson set us to finding a definition of religion that included all the things that we might describe as religions, excluded the things that we didn't want included, and that also hit at the very essence of religion. Not surprisingly we didn't come to any sort of consensus. Interestingly, there were a rather wide range of backgrounds: Presbyterian; Jewish; LDS; ex-Muslim; Taoist (me); eastern mystic; ex-Catholic a few other non-identified Christians; a possible atheist (from the philosophy department; equally possible he was just arguing to argue); and a few others that I couldn't place based on their comments. The closest thing we found to an axiom was the idea of focusing on something eternal, be it eternal life, salvation, bliss, freedom, utopia, etc.

I'm running out of steam, so I'll close this rather rambling post now. I'm sure there's plenty I left out, but if I wait until I get it all in, this post will never get posted.

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Weird Me Interactions

In years past, I've always been happy to see the Halloween displays. Halloween is one of the few major holidays to be openly pagan. This year, though, I noticed that I was avoiding the Halloween displays. If possible, I'd avoid going anywhere near them. If I had to walk by them, I did my best to ignore them. I just might have figured out why tonight. Or part of why.

Normally, I practice ten minutes of empty-mind meditation as part of my daily routine. Since the Halloween thing was bothering me, I used that as a specific focus instead. I cast my mind back to last year and didn't find much, except that maybe my holiday depression started right around Halloween. I also remember looking at the displays and seeing things that Grandma would have liked, and feeling the loss all over again. That wasn't really it, though.

I cast my mind back to the year before. Grandma's birthday is in October, not too long before Halloween. Worse, it was in October that she first went into the hospital. I think seeing the Halloween displays is just too strong a reminder of that. I seem to react most negatively to Halloween style faces, so rows full of masks are...problematic. And pretty much any representation of "Death" results in an immediate, "Bastard!" from somewhere deep inside my mind. Doesn't take a genius to figure that one out. Black cats I'm okay with; faceless pumpkins are fine; autumn leaves, etc, don't bother me at all; coffins I want to smash; costumes result in anger (maybe because they represent hiding of a sort and I'm sick of hiding); animatronic anything makes me feel ill; the whole orange-black-purple color scheme has me seeing red.

I haven't decided if this means I should avoid Halloween displays altogether or keep pushing myself to look at them in an effort to get over the whole thing. The last part sounds eminently sensible, but with my track record over the past year, I doubt I'll go that route. I started confronting emotions head-on after I got sick of hiding from them. Unfortunately, it was often like standing on the railroad tracks and daring the train to hit me. Things aren't as sharp this year, so maybe it won't be so bad, but I'd rather head this off at the pass. I do not want another case of holiday blues.

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RIP

Robert Jordan has been called back into the Pattern. The Wheel Weaves as the Wheel Wills. Perhaps his thread will be spun out again... but probably not in my lifetime. He managed to survive much longer than the doctors expected. I'd never heard of amyloidosis before running across his blog.

I can't think of a single author who has influenced me more. Both the books themselves and the directions in which they sent me. Wheel of Time was also the first fantasy series to truly engage my attention. And, no, he hadn't finished the final WoT book. There's a hint that, perhaps, someone else will finish it using his notes, and the telling that he gave to some close friends and family. But the Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills. Goodbye, Robert Jordan. You are already missed.

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Remembrance

I can't think of anything to say that hasn't been said before. Here are links that I find meaningful. At the second link, Orac asks people what they were doing when they heard the news. My first clue that something was wrong was on the weather channel, which I had muted. There was a notice that all flights had been grounded until further notice. I just thought, "That's weird," and headed to class. Then a student in my numerical analysis class said something about planes crashing into buildings. We were in a computer classroom, so I immediately found a news web-site and read the article in shock. It didn't seem real. Pity that it was.

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