First, do no harm

I'm batting .000 on router repair. I've tried to fix two in the past week. One still doesn't work as it should, and the other is in worse shape than it was before I tinkered with it.

I am again confronted with the reminder that I don't know as much as I like to think I know. People ask me to fix something, and my ego and my codependency-related inability to say 'no' to requests lead me to make my friends' lives marginally less pleasant than they were before I 'helped.'

I'm still working on "'don't know' mind," but I've pretty much mastered "'don't know jack shit' mind."

I spent most of Sunday alone, running errands and doing housework. Trips to Target and Homeland and PetSmart and Borders. Plus a half-hour on the phone trying to talk someone through undoing what I'd done to a router. A lot of this busyness is just to keep the depression at bay. Some meditation teachers suggest that we should sit with our depression and work with it. But others say -- I think this is really important to note -- that depression can actually be amplified by meditation.

Back around 1998-99, when my life went pretty much completely to hell, I reached a point where I could not be alone for more than 48 hours. I had no friends at all at that time, and when my days off from work rolled around each week (on Monday and Tuesday, as I recall), I would be sitting in my apartment with a white-knuckled grip on the arms of my chair, literally trying to avoid killing myself while I was completely alone with my thoughts for two days.

I have gotten so used to being busy socially over the past few months -- and having constant distraction from my depression -- that I had almost forgotten it was there.

But in the final analysis, the depression owns me, or at least a large part of me. I could go back on some drug to alter the chemistry of my brain, but that wouldn't address the larger cosmic question of whether I ought to be depressed. My track record as a useful individual isn't very good and my track record as a wise or knowledgeable person is even worse. Who wouldn't be depressed if they had been as big a flop as a human being as I've been.

(And yet, here's the rub: I don't think I would have it any other way. I can't imagine myself being a cheerful, successful, heartbreakingly handsome overachieving American. I would be even more miserable than I am now.)

I have at least one friend who has taken the Buddhist bodhisattva vow: to delay nirvana and keep coming back, life after life, until all beings have been enlightened.

That, at least, I could recognize as beyond my ken. Yeah, I'm going to enlighten all beings. Jesus. I might as well take a vow to be an NFL quarterback.

My vow is to keep coming back until every wi-fi router on earth is fucked up. That's something I have some reasonable expectation of accomplishing.