Metablog

Everyone would write using the IPA. No more standard spelling. Spelling would change along with pronunciation, and so vary by region and country. No more of this stupid kanji crap, or every other word being completely irregular and impossible to know how to pronounce without a dictionary. “Know”. “How”. QED.

Ehh. Maybe.

My life doesn’t particularly suck—well, kind of, but—but the world does. Poverty. War. Global warming. Peak Oil and the energy crisis. Bowling alone, and the disintegration of community. Sexism. Homophobia. Racism. Sundown towns. Prison. The Drug Wars. The entire fucking justice system. The past eight years in the US. “Education.” Information overload. Healthcare in the US. Misunderstanding of mental illness, and discrimination against the mentally ill. The brokenness of democracy, representative or otherwise. Corruption. Terrible city planning in the past 30 years. [Update: List of woes expanded. Feel free to suggest your own.]

It’s pretty normal for these things to be a little depressing. But what about when they get really depressing? What about when when you’re suicidally depressed (probably not primarily due to the above-mentioned ills), and all these issues are just weighing you down? What do you do? Stop reading the news, stop following all of it? Put yourself in a cocoon and lead your own little life and don’t worry about the bigger picture? Try to forget, as much as possible, that there’s anything out there to worry about? But then, are you somehow deserting a duty to be socially involved? (After all, millions of people in the US doing just that are often given a big share of blame, perhaps deservedly, for the pitiful condition of politics here.) Are you putting yourself at risk of being personally harmed for not following these issues? What if something happens where then it really would make sense for you to move to Canada, if you really thought about it? (In my case, it’d be Spain or the Netherlands, but same diff.)

I’m afraid to stop reading about all this stuff, and afraid to keep reading. Afraid, perhaps, that without the higher narrative provided by politics, my life would completely lack any narrative, and without narrative, who am I? Actually, though, I think using the word “identity” (i.e. “who am I?”) to refer to the concept usually referred to by it is silly. It’s an awful way to describe what it describes. But then, “purpose”—what am I doing here?—, which describes the same thing, is still bad, though closer. I think I would need to understand a lot more psychology a lot better to precisely describe what it is that narrative provides one’s life that is so necessary for well-being. That is, to describe what “purpose” and “identity” really mean, without using vague, ne’er-defined terms.

God I hate living.

On a brighter note, I’m planning to ask someone out early next week. We’ve flirted a little so far, so I’m kind of hopeful, but I’m not even sure she’s single, so I’ll need lots of luck. I’m trying to decide whether to cut my hair in the meantime.

Little Nemo is destroying the clownfish! (Link in Spanish. Muy gracioso español.)

Life is really fucking hard sometimes. Really goddamn hard. My life has been nothing but pain for quite awhile now. There are moments where it’s enjoyable, I suppose. But every time I finish an activity, when my mind has a chance to recenter for a second—even during lulls in otherwise happy conversations—it’s right back to that hopelessness, that apathy, that feeling of being paralyzed and overwhelmed and sometimes even anxious, even panicky. It’s the feeling I live with.

I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist for six months now, and we’ve tried several different medications, and none of them have really worked, except maybe for one, Lamictal, that we had to stop because of some side effects. (There are still a few options to try, though.)

I have what they call treatment-resistant depression. It’s a formidable adversary. I’m in the 15-20% of people with major depression who aren’t helped by the first few medications they try. I have a few bipolar II-type symptoms that complicate treatment decisions. I have many ADHD-like symptoms, (though a clear diagnosis doesn’t seem to be possible in my case). I have delayed sleep phase disorder. (The prevalence is around 0.15%, lucky me, though it’s much higher in the teens and tends to get better over the years, usually. I’m pretty young yet, so it could improve on its own.) DSPD is both very hard to treat and very disruptive to normal lifestyles. In fact, in the cases where it doesn’t respond to treatment, where symptoms are moderate to severe, it’s starting to be regarded as an occupational disability.

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What is it about neediness that’s so unattractive, even for people who are themselves moderately needy? Why is it that confidence is so very widely viewed as so desirable, even a requirement? People take this so far—to the point where even depressed and lonely people try to fake high confidence and energy in order to attract others.

I really don’t understand this well. For me, I’m attracted more to moderately needy people than to people who aren’t, because I like to feel needed. I like to feel important to others. I don’t want to be too independent. This relates to my own insecurities—because I perceive myself as not having a lot of charisma with others, of not being seen as attractive, I try to find someone who sees themself as having a similar lack of power, so that the relationship will be balanced, so I won’t be plagued with fear of abandonment.

Though it might not always be this way, I think that where I am now, I’m going to need to depend a lot, emotionally, on my girlfriend, (if and when I get one,) until I can get happier and more confident. And I don’t want to be taking a huge risk when I do that.

I really don’t understand what the reason behind being so attracted to confidence is, unless you yourself are that confident (in which case the reason seems obvious). Do any readers have any idea what it is?

I got a message from an OKCupid user today, one I hadn’t contacted. It’s nice to get something out of the blue like this:

Hello dear, how are you doing today, hope great, let me introduce myself, my name is merry william , 29 years female from chicago. I searched your profile, read it and I was amazed with the content of your words…

Doesn’t she sound intelligent?

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Online dating has been frustrating for me. I’ve been on OKCupid since last August, ten months ago, and I’ve only gotten two dates out of it. I’ve sent out dozens of messages, and I’ve only gotten responses to maybe 20%. Some of the people with the most promising profiles turned out not to be interested. And I have received only four messages from people I didn’t contact first. So it hasn’t been completely bare, but don’t people typically have more activity than that? Even when I haven’t been doing anything on the site, I regularly log in so that they can see that I’m still active. I have some good, objective reasons to believe that my profile doesn’t have anything seriously wrong with it, though of course there’s always room for improvement.

I wonder if part of my problem is that people just tend to be really picky. I think that the people I’d be interested in would be especially picky. Maybe I’m underestimating how picky most other people are, and so my expectations for success are too high. (Short-term success, for me, would be ongoing conversations with other interesting users leading to around a date per month on average.) Do I need to be less picky to get there? Would I have a much better chance of finding a long-term partner if I were less picky about first dates?

And I’m pretty sure that part of my problem is that I find it hard to get a good idea about someone, to the point where I can actually feel attracted to them, online. On the two dates I’ve actually had, it just ended up feeling weird and flat. I imagine this is unavoidable. You just have to spend time with someone before those feelings can start, and e-mail conversation, especially through a dating site, is a slow, slow process. And then, how long do you need to try to make conversation before you ask someone on a date? Would I have better luck if I sent out first e-mails suggesting a date (along with the usual greeting and conversation starter), instead of e-mails just trying to get a conversation going?

It takes so much energy, and it’s discouraging when you feel like the women don’t have to put as much energy in. I’ve heard a lot of success stories, or at least “success-getting-dates” stories. I’m not one of them.

I am not an introvert. I just reclassified myself today. (Well, back in March when I wrote this, anyway.) I had always thought that being uncomfortable around people, and being socially pretty reclusive, meant that I was introverted. But after reading this WaPo article, (via Overcoming Bias,) I realized that those aren’t really the core traits of introversion as commonly conceived. Introversion, according to Mary Carpenter, means that “[you] don’t reveal [yourself] by working through problems out loud or by talking much about how [you] think or feel.” And that’s pretty much the opposite of me.

In fact, my non-introversion goes farther than that. Why, I’m positively extroverted, considering that I published a diary online for over a year (no longer available), and that I regularly reveal rather intimate things about myself to total strangers in the internet public, or to people IRL that I’m not especially close with.

I could be described as socially isolated or interpersonally hostile, but not introverted, not as a character trait. I do get introverted when I’m around strangers, but that doesn’t mean much. Social anxiety, maybe.

I think blog reading might be a bad thing for an introvert without any real-life friends. (One who’s recently moved, for instance.) Blogs are such a high-quality form of conversation, that most real-life conversations with random people will seem insipid in comparison. (This effect is even greater the smarter the blogs you hang out on are.) So you’re setting yourself up to get a large and essential part of your socialization needs met by a format that can’t really meet the other large part of your socialization needs, and getting yourself used to a level of conversation that you can only find in real-life after years of adjusting your social circle. This decreases your motivation to go out into the world and find things to do where you meet people.

It’s like if all you ate were some really tasty and addictive food that lacked two or three essential nutrients. Enough to keep you alive, but not healthy.

I grew up religious. My family went to Mormon churches, Baptist churches, charismatic churches, and fundie churches. I became an atheist at 16. But I miss churches. I miss a big group of people getting together, open to newcomers, organizing to help those who need help, providing facilities for all sorts of other activities. There are all sorts of good functions provided by a church that have nothing to do with religion. Well, except for one thing.

People don’t like doing those things. To get people to provide the money to have buildings like that, and to run the programs like that, and to pay the people in charge of it all, you have to manipulate them, because there are no honest methods that would work. Because people aren’t that charitable. Sure, they’re charitable, they’re just not that charitable. You pretty much have to couch requests for money in moralizing terms. (Any Unitarians out there know if it works the same way for you? I would suspect so.)

Or maybe the problem is that without grandiose visions, there’s not enough motivation for some people to become ministers and church leaders unless they’re religious, or spiritual. Or that the meme is just not viral enough.

But whatever the cause, I do miss churches. I should try out the local Unitarian church, and see how spiritual they are. Maybe they’re relatively secular. God knows most big Baptist churches are.