my office-my mind

this a picture of my office.

how’d it get like this? years of work. There are a number of contributing factors

disorganized/not enough space – i go to put something away and i don’t know what to do with it. if it doesn’t have a place, i’ll just set in down and commit to getting to it later. later never comes.

a dumping grounds- Mary ask me to take care of a pile of stuff. i have no place for it and i am generally not in the mood to make a decision or there is no place for the thing, so i just stow it away in my office.

a mess begets a mess- The room became a mess. I have something to put away. it may even have a place to go where is make some sense. i enter the office. let’s see, if i step over this pile to step over that pile to step over another pile to step over yet another pile, i could put it away. nah, that’s too much effort, i’ll just drop it here.

computer archaeology- did you know the computers and their peripherals get old and outdated? technology which use to work perfectly fine, won’t even hook up to modern day computers. i guess i hold onto it in case there is an emp. perhaps, the older technology will still work. i have a mac plus, with a full mb of memory! it booted at one time. does it boot today? i don’t know. even if it could boot, it would take quite the convoluted procedure to get the data from that machine to a modern machine. The shortest path would be:

1. load the data to a floppy.
2.  find a newer computer, which i don’t have, that still has a floppy but with ethernet capabilities. network it to an even newer computer, which i don’t have.
3. make sure it has the right version of network software and i could finally transfer it to my current machine.

see, only three step. though, my syquest drive that would work on the mac plus was a massive 40 mb or storage. knowing my computer usage at the time, only a small portion of that would be dedicated to data. furthermore, does anyone remember wordperfect? i do. its file format is convoluted which makes it hard to even easily copy the text out of a raw text file. their formatting was inline. if i haven’t looked at it in two decades, how important is the data, anyway?

the office suffers from two main problems:

1. i hold on to stuff, thinking, hoping it will be useful to me or someone else at some further date. This goes beyond the office.
2. i don’t have a clue of what to do with whatever is in my hands. the anxiety builds quickly. the only way to escape it, is to get what ever out of my hands. it gets added to the pile of unknowns.

If you remember advanced algebra at all, and equation of so many unknowns needs at least that many equations to solve for the unknowns. the pile contains a lot of unknowns and will require many more equations just to solve it.

of course the analogy between my office and my mind, are frighteningly similar.

1.  i keep hold of stuff, hoping that those thoughts or experiences might help me or someone else some time in the future. most of the time, they just weigh me down.
2. I have something in my life that i have no clue how to handle. i find my pile and add it there. slowly the anxiety abates but the residual remains. perhaps, adding it to the pile is a good short term solution, but not so for the long term.

where do i go from here? first, what has writing this done to me? as i wrote this i could begin to feel the anxiety build. the anxiety has increased to such a level that a knot of fear has taken up residence in my pit of my stomach.

fear? what fear? three rear the ugly heads; the fear that i’ll get rid of something i’ll need next week, the fear i won’t do it perfectly (perfectionism on a pile of stuff, jees), and the fear that like so many times before, i would not be able to complete it (fear of failure). enumerated the fears only made the knot a little tighter.

i guess i’ll make the decision to move forward like george mallory did and attempt to climb my mountain. hopefully my outcome ends up a little better than mallory’s. mr. mallory attempted his summit of mt. everest in 1929. evidence found in 1999, the photos on his camera, show he succeeded in summiting his mountain. unfortunately, he succumbed to the brutal conditions on his descent.

jimmy’s lost, but only in my dreams

well, if you want to call it a dream, more like a nightmare.

Mary and i came home to jimmy not being home. in a dream, mind you. thankfully, this time, unlike last time,  it wasn’t my fault. he had been gone 2-3 days.

Mary, not unexpectedly and justifiably, acted hysterical. I tried to calm her down just enough to lay out a plan of how we would go about, hopefully getting him back. I woke up.

it’s 3:00 am. the dream felt so real, it broke the dream wake barrier. the knot of fear resides in my gut. it’s a tight and persistent one. it’s not real, it’s not real, i try to convince myself to no avail.

i decided to make life real. jimmy had set up residence on the floor last night. i went and got him, returned to bed. “see, it’s not real, it’s not real,” trying yet again to convince myself. i tried to be logical with myself, “how could he be lost and you are holding him?” the fear continued to grip me.

next, i turned to acceptance. “this is fear. it’s not a monster. it’s just trying to tell me that i fear a life without jimmy since he is the best dog in the world! it’s just fear, it’s just fear. don’t be afraid of it, don’t run from it,” i say trying to convince myself. the knot shows it first sign of loosening, but it still has a dead grip on my night.

it is now 7:00 am. jimmy lays next to me with his head resting on my thigh. Mary lay on the other side of jimmy checking out facebook. sherlock rests on the floor next to the bed.* me? I still feel the knot of fear in my gut. i almost got it to loosen enough to get back to sleep, but that didn’t happen. the day lays in front of me, a guess with a little less sleep. hopefully the knot of fear will let got; it isn’t real.

* no, it’s not an injustice that jimmy can come on the bed and sherlock can’t. sherlock had a bad back, a mind of his own, and needs to change position every half hour or so. maybe he’ll jump down one of those times and hurt his back. then the entire family feels miserable, hoping that we are able to convalesce him back to health.

ding dong the witch is dead?

if you are not up date on the happenings with my fence and neighbor, you might be appalled. there has been some further development since then. let me bring you up to date.

i’ve gone to calling my neighbor the wicked witch to the east, with her flock to flying monkeys. she seem to have an innate ability to turn updates and suggestion and supporting information and turn herself in a victim and a martyr and also attack, at the same time.

i hate mean neighbors

remember good fences make good neighbors? to recap, i completely paid for a new fence and one neighbor has given me nothing but grief each step of the way. i have tried to distance myself the best that I can and yet there are still two potential points of conflict and contention that lurk on the horizon.

the first being finishing our side of the fence. we are using an oil based stain which has the consistency of water, dark water mind you. i did a sample section of the fence and ran into three concerns any of which will send her ballistic. (1) great care will have to be taken so the stain doesn’t run over the top of the board, (2) the stain could leak through knots which are open enough and, (3) stain bleed through if there is enough gap between the boards. I can meticulously stain her section of the fence, yet I fear the smallest mistake will send her ape shit, yet again.

i also plan to put pavers under the fence to hopefully minimize wicking of the water from the bottom of the fence. i would like to straddle the fence line for better protection. she doesn’t want the pavers on her side of the fence so she has asked that the pavers not extend beyond her side of the fence board. the fence board itself is only a half-inch thick, so i even plan a quarter-inch set back, hopefully limiting her opportunity to complain. I fear that complain she will. she’ll simply look at the pavers and ever though they will not extend onto her side, she’ll defy the laws of mathematics and claim that they do. she’ll have another opportunity to go ape shit, yet again.

maybe i’m awfulizing, but her history indicates something different.

li feel a little how dorothy and her troop from the wizard of oz felt. even though they seldom saw their wicked witch, that constantly lived in fear of her. i have my own wicked witch to the east. i will currently live in fear of her and her next dispatch of flying monkeys.
The fear runs strong. I felt tired at 10:30, which is a rarity, came to bed and immediately started to worry/fear about her next response, what her next flock of flying monkeys will attempt to do. it nears 3:30 and still can not sleep. i know that she doesn’t deserve this power but her history as a bully frightens me.

until i finish this fence project, am able to splash water on her, click my heels together three times and return to my kansas, free from her evil domain, she will continue to hold way too much sway over me.

screw wicked witches! they suck! let’s burn them at the stake.

tolerating our dark emotions

i continue to sing the praises of the pixar movie, inside out. i have made so many fruitful discoveries since i saw the movie. it has been a powerful and learning process for me since seeing the movie.

for those of you who don’t know, inside out is about the emotions living inside the head of an eleven year old and how those responses color her world. i still shake my head in amazement that a supposed “kids” movie could do such and excellent treatment of emotions and emotional responses.

weird- no, strange

today, i’m going to a bar-b-que — and i’m gut tingling excited about it. let me set the mood. the bar-b-que will happen at someone’s house that i’ve only met once. there’ll will be a grand total of five people there that i’ve ever talked to. ya know, i’m not painting enough of picture here. let me back up.

r*e*s*p*e*c*t

i don’t care about what you think about me, but i do care how you treat me.

a friend of mine shared this mantra with me. with the sound of Aretha franklin echoing in my head, i thought about the saying, i realized the i do care how you treat me part represents a statement of respect and/or compassion. secondly, I realized how most people with social anxiety, at least at some level, struggle with respect.

asking for help to find my blue sky-replies

 in my previous post, asking for help to find my blue sky, i asked one of my sister to practice acknowledgments with me. i explained what they were, gave her some examples and share the benefits with her .i got two replies from her. i  found them to be disappointing. her replies will be indented; my thought will be out-dented. her two replies came within an hour of each other.

[Guest Post] Depression, Stigma and Society

Hi, I’m Depressionless and I am fortunate enough to be able to write a guest post on this blog. For more of my writing, check out my blog at depressionless.wordpress.com.

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Some people have depression because of family issues, some have depression because they have lost someone they love, but when I was asked why I have depression I just couldn’t reply. It is not because I didn’t want to tell them, I actually had no idea. I still cannot figure it out. It doesn’t make sense. Depressionless, you can’t be depressed, look how good your life is… Yeah, that probably makes the whole feeling worse.

There is a lack of understanding about depression. The first friend I told (except for my really good friend who lives 3000 miles away) could not understand how I had depression. “But you look so happy all the time” was one of the first things they said as we sat on the park bench discussing my mental illness. I just replied with “Yeah, I look happy, but I have depression”. Maybe it is because teenagers have no understanding of the world yet, or maybe people judge a book by it’s cover. This is why I do not tell people about my depression. Those who don’t understand (the majority of people) will think I am making it up or think I am attention seeking, just because they don’t really know how depression affects me.

I’m not the only one. There is a stigma around depression which forces those suffering from it to stay silent. For me, the internet is the only way I can talk about it because people cannot judge me, only what I write. Without the internet I would never have seen a doctor, or my counsellor, or realised I had depression, or receive help from my friend who lives 3000 miles away. People don’t understand depression until someone they know suffers from it, which is very sad. It takes anonymity for many people to get help, and anonymity is not the best way. It is hard to help your depression by sitting behind a screen in your bedroom, in fact that could make everything worse.

If the stigma behind depression were to disappear I am certain you would suddenly hear about a lot of people you know suffering from depression. At the moment, I don’t know anyone who has depression yet statistics suggest 1 in 4 people in the UK will experience some kind of mental health problem each year. I know quite a few people, so I can’t see how that statistic would make sense if I was the only one in 20, or 50, or 100. The truth is that people you know will be hiding their depression from you. I am hiding my depression from most of my friends. That may not be your fault, society as a whole is to blame. But society must change, and then the care of those suffering will also improve.

Hiding your depression hurts. You need to be cared for in a special way. But you can’t get help because of society. That is the problem. How do we solve it? Simple, we must educate. When everyone knows the truth about depression, they will understand what sufferers go through better, and they may be able to help instead of forcing the sufferers to stay silent. Bloggers such as myself try to show the world the truth. The internet has various sites that teach you about depression, teach you about the illness that is more than just feeling sad. Many of you will have thought depression is just feeling sad, and if that is your belief you should read up on it. I hope you never have to suffer from depression, but I do hope you can understand and empathise with those who do. The more you know the better you can help.

The big wind of ’14

i sit here in the dark tapping out this post my ole reliable ipad. thank god for battery powered devices. you see, tonight is, said with the proper booming voice, the  big wind of ’14.  before losing power the local tv station broke in giving a update of the storm every commercial break. then a flicker and another, then we plunged into total darkness.

i’m going to take this opportunity to tell some wind stories of mine. I don’t think they are too scary, but you might want to cuddle up with your teddy bear, just in case. it never bad to cuddle with teddy, anyway.

i first encountered wind as a young child, less than 10 years old. when ever we had a big wind, i would shiver violently in fear. the noises scared me and I had fear that some nearby tree would come crashing downing my bed. of course, the nearest tall tree stood probably 60 yards away. those trees couldn’t even do any damage because the prevailing winds wouldn’t even blow the tree towards our house. tell that to an eight year old. so, I lived in fear of big winds.

i normally slep up stairs. on windy nights I sought the comfort and solace of one of the down stair bedrooms until I could finally shiver myself to sleep.

until one windy night. it was a dark and stormy night. I had had it with fearing this wind. That night, I made a pact with myself to show strength and stay up stairs, all night. i shivered violently just like any of the windstorms before, but this time, I stayed up stairs! wind never had power over me in my childhood years, ever again.

step forward some twenty years as we moved into our new and current house. there are two trees that concern me. they are both to the south of us and big storms around here kick up winds from the sound.  one would wreck havoc, landing on the foot side of the master bedroom and the other would do damage, landing on our garage and cars. The first tree has enough heftTo do major structural damage and scare the bjezes out of us at the same time, especially if we were peacefully resting. the second tree doesn’t have near the heft of the first tree so I believe its damage would be rather minimal. the fact that we live in a well wooded suburban neighborhood ends up offering us protection. there are enough trees to the south of us to rob just enough of the wind’s energy to keep our trees standing, hopefully for as long as we live here.

which brings us to tonight. the power is out and the only light in the house comes from my ipad or flashlights as we move around the house. I find amazing the amount of light that all of our electronic devices and appliances give off. The  blacks are a little more blacker this evening because of the lack of power.

the winds continue to howl outside, sometimes as loud as a double fortissimo. for you who don’t know music terms, that means very loud, where triple fortissimo generally gets recognized as playing the loudest the instrument will play. when it the loudest, it reminded of the sound at the end of the runway as a plane comes in for a it’s noisy landing. the sound kicks up my fear, not like my childhood uncontrollable shiver fear but more like a putting a sizable knot in my stomach. thankfully, the wind, and with it, the sound, has died down, more like a mezzo forte, medium loud, to forte, loud.

which brings me to my final realization, which i recognized last year, that I will share about before signing off for the evening. take a small branch and whip it through the air. it will create a relatively high pitched sound. now take another larger bow and wave it through the air; it will create a lower pitched sound. as you wave even larger bows the sound will get lower and lower. now, imagine a wind blowing through the trees. everything from flutes, the small branches, to bases, the largest bows, play their song. the wind in the trees creates a full blown orchestra! The higher the wind speed, the louder and more intense the orchestral movement becomes. sometimes I try to use the orchestra to calm and sooth my nerves trying to loosen the intricate knots that resides in my now tired mid section.

postscript: our power came back on about 2:30 am. as mary drove out of the neighborhood heading to work this morning, she called me with an update. just over two blocks from our house, the neighborhood still remains without the electrical juice that our society has so come to rely on. What a difference two blocks can make.