Depression and 'The View'

I guess I've been aware for awhile that Rosie O'Donnell has been a regular on The View – a show I've never seen.

And I'm aware, through the process of Shit-to-Brain Osmosis, that she has had some dispute with Donald Trump and some other dispute with Elisabeth somebody – begins with an 'H.'

Based on various cues I pick up on The Huffington Post and elsewhere, Elisabeth H. is somebody whom I should instantly recognize as An Important Person, and yet I can't even remember her last name, nor do I have any idea what she does other than argue with Rosie O'Donnell on The View.

One of the symptoms of my depression is that I lack enthusiasm for living.

This, I assume, is an example of that lack of enthusiasm. I don't know who Elisabeth H. is, I don't know what she and Rosie argued about, I haven't made any effort to find out, and I don't give a damn.

Why should I care? It's The View, for crying out loud, not the U.N. Security Council. And if it were the U.N. Security Council, I'm still not sure I'd care.

If I were more concerned about The View, and whatever Lindsay Lohan is doing this week (another Important Person I'm supposed to care about, even though I have next to no idea who she is or what she's done), would that indicate I'm less depressed?

More thoughts on the tests

I've been trying to organize some thoughts about these test results.

Depression – my depression, at least – doesn't seem to be about anything. I'm just depressed. As I've said before, I could win the PowerBall, date Angelina Jolie and bring world peace, and I'd still be depressed.

It's like having a cold, as I've also said before, except it never seems to completely go away. I'm rarely desperately, want-to-die depressed, as I once frequently was. But the constant state is exhausting. It's like walking around with three or four bricks hanging around my neck... not too heavy to carry, but enough to wear me down after awhile.

I guess I could go back on some drug for it.

More test results

www.mentalhelp.net

"You appear to be suffering from moderate to severe depressive symptoms commonly associated with serious depressive disorders, such as major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder or dysthymia. These symptoms appear to be causing you some serious impairment and distress in your normal, everyday functioning. You would likely benefit from the immediate attention of your physician or a trained mental health professional for further evaluation and a more accurate diagnosis and treatment."

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www.bchealthguide.org

"You may be suffering from mild to moderate depression."

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www.mentalhealthscreening.org

"Your screening results are consistent with symptoms of depression or bipolar disorder. While depression is characterized by a consistently low mood, bipolar disorder alternates between low moods and "high" or irritable moods."

I may also be bipolar, according to this site, although the symptoms haven't surfaced in seven or eight years.

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I'm surprised that the questions and format of each of these six tests has been a little different. You know how people just steal stuff off other websites. But all these have been unique.

Wed afternoon

Checking from the Red Cup branch office of 3:40 a.m.

I'm burning through the 240-odd hours of leave I've accumulated with a series of long lunch hours, and so here I am.

I'm a lot less stressed than I was 48 hours ago. But if I took another of those online depression tests right now, I'd still probably test positive. (or negative, or whatever)

Some loudmouth is blathering behind me about 60s rock. STFU.

Almost midnight

Slept for several hours, but I'm awake again.

I'm in transition, and it's got me stressed and depressed.

Of course, we're always in transition. But sometimes it seems scarier than other times.

Paseo Arts Festival - day 2 and 3

Obviously, nothing changed from Saturday. Why go back?

In part because I needed distraction. For all my talk about being/not being and seeing every small thing as just the tip of the whole universe, I'm not comfortable with my own thoughts. Nor am I comfortable in my ratty messy house.

The short version of my story is that I abhor repetitive tasks.

My neighbors loathe the way my house and yard look, and don't mind letting me know it. They are perfectly content pushing a lawn mower back and forth over the same grass weekend after weekend. I can't stand it.

I can't stand housecleaning or doing laundry.

So I have to get away, and I do. And I shall.

Paseo Arts Festival

I went twice today.

Bought art. (Yes, it is art.)

Saw Westika at the Blue Moon. Heard Kristen sing, and I hope we'll all have that opportunity again in the future.

Kelley O was working in the children's art section, wherever that was. If I could have found it, I would have had her paint something on my arm. No, I'm not a child... but I'm an adult male, and that's a lot like a child, isn't it?

I overheard someone say Paseo is better than the downtown festival, and I have to agree.

Saw a Paseo neighborhood home I liked today. Too big for my needs and the price is more than I want to spend. But the location is almost perfect.

If an elephant shits in the jungle and no one is around to see it, is he still huge?

What makes an elephant huge? I don't mean diet or DNA. I mean what makes it so that being the size of an elephant makes an elephant huge?

The answer is that we decided an elephant is huge, and by that we mean huge compared to us. Similarly, when we say a Pomeranian is small, we mean a Pomeranian is small compared to ourselves. It's always about us.

If field mice got to decide this stuff, the Pomeranian would be huge, and the elephant would be -- well, I don't know what. Ask a field mouse if you see one.

But the elephant is huge not because of anything the elephant did, but because humans decided he was huge. So if the elephant shits in the jungle and no one is around to think, "Wow, that's a huge elephant shitting in the jungle," is he still huge? Obviously, he's the same size he would be if he was shitting with a human audience. But it's only the human perception that makes him "huge."

No humans, no hugeness.

He is neither huge nor not-huge... because no judging, analyzing, measuring, categorizing human is there to attach a concept to his size.

Thursday PM

At the Red Cup tonight. Spaghetti with marinara is the special, and I could eat it every day.

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It's probably just my perception, but this laptop seems to have become really really really slow.

Maybe it's had some brownies or something.

I'm due for a MacBook Pro. Maybe in June, if they update them at WWDC.

The Internets say I'm depressed

After making the previous post, I decided to check one of those 'Are you depressed?' quizzes on the web. You may recall I took one last year which said I was depressed.

I Googled the phrase "Are you depressed?" and turned up several depression tests. I decided to take three of them:

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New York University School of Medicine

"Your answers reflect the presence of significant depressive symptoms. It is advised to seek a psychiatric consultation."

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www.psychcentral.com

"Based upon your responses to this depression quiz, you appear to be suffering from a moderate to severe depression. People who have answered similarly to you typically qualify for a diagnosis of major depression and have sought professional treatment for this disorder."

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www.everydayhealth.com

"Warning! Make an appointment with your doctor.

"Based on your answers, you exhibit many of the characteristics that are common among people with depression. While this quiz does not provide a definitive diagnosis, it’s important that you see your physician for a screening. Your doctor will want to rule out any physical problems first, and then he or she may recommend that you see a psychologist or a psychiatrist. If you have thoughts of suicide, or if you’ve recently tried to take your own life, seek immediate help. Call 1-800-SUICIDE, or a local suicide helpline, and talk to a crisis counselor."

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Looks like I hit the trifecta. Especially with everydayhealth.com, where I seem to have also won the bonus round. That number again: 1-800-SUICIDE.

More great news

I can imagine the universe as a great river, infinitely wide. It flows slowly, eternally, with no thought of where it's going, or why it's going there. It has no concept of time, of distance, or even of its own existence. It is not alive in any sense of the word we understand, and yet it exists, always in motion.

And off in one little eddy of this unimaginably vast, unthinking, unknowing river, some joker has poured a box of laundry detergent. And in that little eddy, so small as to be essentially invisible on the vast surface of this eternal river, billions of tiny soap bubbles form, float briefly, then pop.

Those soap bubbles are us, bobbing along, full of our important goals and plans and projects, proudly and busily building our skyscrapers, fighting our wars, getting our bonuses, salting our french fries and buying our SUVs. But as profoundly important as all this stuff is to us, we are actually so small as to be invisible. We are a trail of soap bubbles a foot across and thirty feet long floating on a river a trillion to the trillionth power miles wide. We are a temporary and inconsequential anomaly in a cosmos that neither notices us nor is affected by our doings. Eventually the last of us will disappear, and a half hour later, it will be as if we never existed.


























Of course, if we win the PowerBall, all this will change.

The deed is done

I set my departure date today - officially gone August 31, but because of accumulated leave, I'll be out in mid-July. (I have yet to take three consecutive days of vacation.)

This is the best job I've ever had. Others paid more, but with far more craziness/megalomania/etc.

But the job has reached the point where about 70 per cent of what I do is clerical, and only about 30 per cent is the stuff I was hired to do five years ago.

I could stay and be a comfortably-paid clerk, but the mind-numbing repetitiveness has worn me down.

I suggested, quite seriously, that a computer program could do most of what I do now, and that they should go that direction for my replacement, or at least hire an actual clerk instead of paying a creative-level person to batch process Word files into pdfs.

As for me, I can afford to retire (barring some economic cataclysm) and that's what I intend to do.

2:09 am

I'm awake. Nothing else to report.

Depression

I was down a little this weekend. This comes and goes, as I've mentioned before, and I assume it will pass.

soartstar says I'm in amore or less continual state of depression, and that's why I have so little enthusiasm for things.

Personally, I think enthusiasm in overrated, and I wonder why other people get so worked up over stuff.

In all fairness...

I did, in fact, say in my profile I am an artist, while I believe I don't produce enough art to claim the designation. So, I am henceforth simply a 'sentient being.'

Also a sedentary being, but maybe I can change that when I have more free time. I'm serious about riding the bike everywhere.

Friday AM

As some of you already know, I am pondering early retirement.

I am also shopping, although not wholeheartedly, for a new home. I love the house I'm in, but I want a place east of Classen and within bicycling distance of my regular hangouts.

My plan is to use the minivan for grocery shopping and little else; the bike will be my basic transportation.

I hope to have all this accomplished by the end of the year.

What that dude said

TIME magazine has an excerpt from Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason.

Here it is

Look around you. Here it is.

But:

Free yourself from the concept of 'here.'

Liberate yourself from the notion of 'it.'

And forget about what the definition of 'is' is.

Now... what are you left with?

I know, but I can't tell you, because there are no words with which to say it.

You'll just have to see it for yourself.

Assimilated by the Borg

I got a cellphone over the weekend. I haven't had one since 2000, and didn't especially want one, since telephony can be a gateway drug leading to direct human contact.

But Nurse Kathryn insisted I needed one, and offered to do the human contact necessary to consummate the relationship with Cingular.

So we went to the Cingular store where I sat with a white-knuckled grip on the arms of the chair. I now have a KRZR (pronounced cra-zer, which isn't a word, but maybe it should be), and a plan that has 450 rollover minutes plus some number of regular hours plus some number of other hours plus some other shit but no text messaging but one friend has already sent me a text message which I'll have to pay $45 to have received or something.

And I don't even really want to talk to anyone.

Is it art?

Larry has a post on pop*modern describing a recent discussion session on the subject of 'What is art?'

I was a participant in that conversation. Whatever it was I said that evening - and I don't remember because, frankly, I was just blathering - I now retract.

While it may be appropriate to ask in a broad sense, 'What is art?' I think it's dangerous to look at a particular piece and ask, as we did hypothetically that evening, 'Is this art?'

When we look at something and ask, 'Is this art?' we begin to distance ourselves from it. It is another example of having an experience and, rather than letting the experience speak to us directly, forcing it to compete with a bunch of stuff we drag out of our footlocker of memories, opinions and preferences - all the stuff we use as benchmarks for classifying, measuring and pigeonholing.

Better to simply experience the thing - nothing else.

The danger in this approach is that crap becomes accepted as art because although everyone sees the emperor has no clothes, no one will say so, and the next thing you know the crap's being sold in mass quantities on cable shopping channels. But that doesn't seem to me to be as much of a danger as letting our experiences be limited by our preconceptions and judgments.

(There are exceptions to this rule. Somewhere in my brain is stored the notion that being hit by a semi on the highway hurts. I'll live with that prejudice - I won't stand in the middle of I-35 to experience it directly.)

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Some time back, I read several passages about stuff being neither phenomena nor not-phenomena. 'Well, stuff has got to be one or the other,' I thought to myself. 'I sort of get this concept, but not really.'

Well, now I get it. (The usual disclaimer applies.)

If I say, 'This stuff is phenomena,' I've classified it. Granted, I've classified it at the broadest, most vague level, but I've classified it nonetheless. Once again, I've filtered the experience through my own memories and opinions.

But what about, 'This stuff is not phenomena.'? Well, I've classified it again, but this time by exclusion.

So the key is to view stuff as neither phenomena nor not-phenomena.

What stuff?

You know... stuff.

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Another quiet Friday evening. Not phenomena, not not-phenomena.

Thursday PM

If a man dies and is reincarnated as a sparrow,
Has his karma rewarded him or punished him?

Thursday

I have nothing to report.

Monday

I went home after two hours. The sore throat is gone, but I'm running a fever and have a headache. I have been sick a lot over the past year - at least a lot for me - and it's wearing me down.

I think I have a little bit of a chill, too.

Hack, sniffle, sneeze

If you've had any face-to-face contact with me since Wednesday or so, you know that my allergies have knocked me on my ass.

I woke up this morning with a sore throat that persists this evening, coupled with all the sniffling and sneezing I've been doing four five or six days.

On top of that we've had this oppressive humidity all weekend, and it's drained me.

So I've spent most of the weekend in the house, trying to stay cool and sucking Hall's throat lozenges.

I almost prefer being really seriously ill to this annoying stuff.

Career advice

Never try to teach a pig to sing. You'll only waste your time and annoy the pig.

– Folk saying, sometimes attributed to Robert Heinlein

The usual disclaimer applies

As always, and especially when I'm writing about subjects more complex than cat barf, readers should be aware that I may have no idea whatsoever what I'm talking about.

No-mind

Erika West found on YouTube the 'big rubber ball scene' from I Heart Huckabee's.

I didn't understand the full significance of this scene the first couple of times I saw it. But it's essentially the same thing that happens when a student gets whacked with the zen stick: for a split-second after you get smacked, you experience 'no-mind,' which is what Albert means when he says "you stop thinking."

It's not in the clip, but the scene ends like this:

Albert: It’s like I’m a rock or a dish of mold.
Albert: I’m whatever else is around. So I’m free to just exist.
Tommy: This is the answer. We just have to be this all day, every day.

Look at what happens here. First of all, Albert feels a need to define the experience.

And as soon as he feels the need to define the experience, he starts to lose the experience, to distance himself from it: "It's like I'm a rock or a dish of mold."

After that flash of direct seeing, he reaches into his own mind to come up with something with which to compare it. Since he has no experience at being a rock or a dish of mold (unless you believe in reincarnation), he pulls the comparison, in this case, from his imagination.

And given Albert's personality, it's no accident that he likened the experience to being a dish of mold rather than, say, a sunflower or a songbird. So the direct experience becomes tainted with aspects of Albert's own neuroses.

This is the the challenge, and one with which I struggle: to experience directly, without comparisons, cross-references, suppositions or assumptions. The moment you say, even to yourself, "It's like..." you've lost it.

Also:

Is there some reason or purpose to me having a sock drawer? Do I actually need to have one?

No meaning/no purpose redux

In comments to the previous post, freedomauthority wrote

When you write: "Many people seem to feel safer believing that a deity is running their lives and setting their goals. But deprived of the wonderful plan some supreme being supposedly has for your life, you must pursue harmony, inner balance and morality on your own." What about the Sangha? What about interdependence? What about "No-Self"?

I don't believe that Buddhism arrived in this world as a mission delivered to us by a higher power. Buddhism has nothing like a 'Great Commission.' There is a pledge to forego nirvana in order to seek the enlightenment of all beings, but it is voluntary and called into doubt by the Buddha himself in the Diamond Sutra.

Buddhism and Taoism present themselves to us as totally man-made creations - the product of the accumulated wisdom of dozens of teachers, of whom the Buddha and Lao-Tzu themselves are the most prominent, but not the first or the last.

The 'punishment' for failing to follow the eightfold path or the precepts of the Taoist canon are essentially self-inflicted; there is no invisible super-being with borderline personality disorder waiting to throw us into a lake of fire because, after we were given 'free choice,' he didn't approve of the choice we made.