Category Archives: depression

Quit hittin’ yerself

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This morning I caught myself being a judgemental jerk about something I saw online and it got me thinking.

As I read the thing that set me off, I was initially thinking, ‘This is terrible. How does this person not see that this is terrible?’. That led me to wondering whether the author was just supremely self-confident and literally gave no fucks about what anyone thought of what they wrote, or if perhaps they were that rare type of person who is truly naive to the fact that they may not actually be any good at the thing they’re trying to do.

At that point, I realized a couple things.

First, it dawned on me that I am, in fact, deeply jealous of most confident people. People who go through life doing what they want to do and not worrying about how it looks to anyone else tend to annoy me because that’s how I would like to be. It’s like the whole teenage girl phenomena of hating the pretty girls because they’re pretty, you know? We tend to resent people who have the things or traits we want for ourselves. And yes, I absolutely understand that jealousy is an enormous waste of energy, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to shut off.

Second, and far more importantly, I realized that I am the asshole that I am most afraid of. I am not just the loudest one running myself down but in fact often the ONLY one running myself down. I talk myself out of all kinds of things because I worry that I’ll be seen as ridiculous / pathetic / unskilled / a failure, but it’s really only ME that will repeatedly tell me that I’m any of those things anyway. My husband doesn’t do that, my parents don’t do that, my friends don’t do that…hell, most random strangers don’t even do that. It’s pretty much just me.

I’m in an abusive relationship with my own mind, basically.

Soooo…yeah. There’s that. Leaving the situation doesn’t really feel like a viable option currently (and I am grateful every day that that’s the case, trust me), so I guess that means I have to learn how to not be that asshole to myself anymore.

If anybody has any tips on how to go about that, feel free to lay ’em on me.

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“Look, I can keep listening to you but it’s going to cost more peanuts. Chipmunk therapy ain’t free.” – Steve the Chipmunk, MD

mystery peaches

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Last night I dreamed that I was at a grocery store. I ended up in the produce section, in front of a display of peaches. I carefully selected five of them, sniffing each one to make sure it was at peak peachy-ness, then placing them gently into a plastic bag. I don’t remember paying for them in the dream, but I’m pretty sure that can’t be held against me in a court of law, so NYEH NYEH, dream grocery store! I DO WHAT I WANT.

Anyway.

So I had this bag of perfect peaches and I was super happy about it. I was kind of half wandering / half floating through the parking lot of the store when I noticed there was a car with the trunk left open, bags of groceries sitting unattended within. I looked around and didn’t see anyone who seemed to be obviously responsible for said car and groceries, so I slid over and deposited my bag of perfect peaches into one of the grocery bags.

Except, as I was doing that, the parking lot turned into someone’s kitchen and the trunk of the car turned into the crisper drawer in the refrigerator in said kitchen (because dreams are bizarre). It was very certainly not my home and not my fridge, and I knew that at the time. I tucked the bag of peaches into the drawer and felt immensely satisfied about the fact that the person who came home and looked in the fridge later would find a bag of surprise peaches and spend several minutes standing there thinking, “but I didn’t BUY peaches, did I? No, I definitely didn’t. I don’t think. Do I even like peaches? Should I EAT these mystery peaches? I don’t know where they came from. What if they kill me?”  It was like I was getting great glee from someone else’s potential befuddlement and worry, which is kind of funny on the surface, but really kind of fucked up if you start thinking about it.

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Sidenote: peach pits have always creeped me out. There are way too many tiny places bugs could live in a peach pit. Also, today is all about me ruining peaches for everyone, apparently. Sorry, peach farmers.

This morning in an attempt to make myself feel better about clearly being a total asshole in my dream, I took to teh Googles to look up what it means to dream about sneakily inserting peaches into someone else’s fridge. As you can imagine, that particular text string didn’t yield anything useful. But, I DID find a section about peaches in an online dream dictionary which, if anything, made the whole situation more confusing:

“To see a peach in your dream represents pleasure and joy. You take pleasure in the simple things in life. The dream may also imply that something in your life is just “peachy” and going well. Alternatively, a peach may be indicative of virginity, lust and sensuality. Consider how it may be a metaphor for your sweetheart or loved one.”

Ok, so I was trying to give someone else pleasure and joy, but sneakily rather than outright? That actually kind of sounds like me, to be fair. Although, in the dream I was also finding amusement in the fact that the (metaphorical) pleasure and joy I was giving was somehow going to scare or worry the recipient in some way. Also, if the peach is a metaphor for my loved one, I was happy to give him away.

So basically what I’m getting from this is that I’m a gastronomic sociopath who possibly also wants to pimp her husband out to strangers.

But that’s not even the weird part, because then there was THIS:

“Dreaming of wiping melted chocolate off of a wrinkly peach relates to having someone completely dependent on you or having to take care of someone.”

FIRST OF ALL, that seems incredibly specific. Like maybe the author had a super uncomfortable dream about wiping chocolate off a wrinkly peach at some point and tried to make themselves feel better by adding it to the dictionary so that it would seem like a common thing that a lot of people dream about.

Second, you cannot say something like ‘wiping melted chocolate off of a wrinkly peach’ to someone with an overactive imagination like mine without it going to some VERY weird places.

Places I really didn’t ever need to go and would like to forget the routes to.

Have you gotten there yet? I bet you have. I’M SO SORRY.

But I’m also laughing hysterically at the thought. So maybe the dream dictionary wasn’t so far off after all…

Vindication is sweet, especially when it comes from unexpected sources…like random 14 year old girls.

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I think I’ve talked before about how my office-mate listens to the Margaritaville XM radio station on his computer all day, every day…and I don’t mean on his headphones, either.
The station is a mix of Jimmy Buffett originals, him doing covers, other people doing covers of HIS stuff, reggae, country…basically anything vaguely beach-themed. Which doesn’t sound that bad in theory, right? I don’t mind reggae or country. Hell, I actually LIKE some of Jimmy Buffett’s music.

What I DON’T like is not having any control over what I’m listening to for eight hours a day. After a while it becomes like an audio version of waterboarding. I am literally incapable of tuning noises, especially voices, out a lot of the time. Fighting with my brain to focus and get things done when I’m constantly distracted by background noise (especially ones that annoy me) quickly becomes exhausting.

Also, with this station it’s not like you hear a song once on a Monday and then don’t hear it again until Thursday or something. No, this is the same maybe 40 songs over and over, day in and day out. A lot of them are covers, so you might actually hear three different versions of the same song done by various artists over the course of the day. That’s just completely eye-twitch-inducing in my book. The only defense I have is to put my headphones in and listen to my own music or to white noise tracks…otherwise I am stuck listening to this fucking Margaritaville station for seriously 40 hours a week because I’m too “nice” to kick up a fuss and make him shut his music off.

So this afternoon when I happened to have removed my headphones briefly, I heard office-mate’s 14 year old daughter, (who is coming to work with him all this week (which is an entirely different rant that I’d like to write but I won’t)), pipe up with the following:

“Dad, don’t you get sick of this station? I mean, it’s just the same songs over and over again.”

…I kind of wanted to hug her. Finally, FINALLY, proof that I’m not just being a spoiled asshole (in this regard, anyway. There are plenty of other areas where I’m sure I could be proven to be a definite spoiled asshole), and that I’m not imagining the repetitious nature of the radio station.

SUCK ON THAT, RADIO MARGARITAVILLE.
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Remember

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Let’s face it, the world has been pretty extra fucked up lately. The 24 hour news cycle only serves to exacerbate things, and social media is never so busy as when there’s a tragedy or a polarizing debate. You have to be pretty determined in order to not hear any news or opinion over the course of a whole day.

There are some people who thrive on this constant stream of information, these depictions and descriptions of sometimes downright terrible stuff. They enjoy reading, if not participating in, debate and they would much rather be connected to what’s going on than disconnected. There are others who don’t get so actively involved. They see things and just take them in stride. Or maybe it’s that they know their limits and can walk away when they need to. Perhaps they’re even detached and ambivalent – just observing what goes on in the world around them without ever getting “sucked in”.

Then there’s people like me. As much as it often pains me to admit it, I’m sensitive.

Being sensitive wasn’t considered a good thing in our family when I was a kid. My people are an exceedingly undemonstrative people and I had to learn to at least fake toughness, if not actually toughen up. I tend to feel things very deeply and they stick with me for a long time. I cry ridiculously easily. I get over-stimulated by conditions and situations that a lot of friends and acquaintances often don’t even notice, let alone get bothered by. These traits all work at direct odds with that toughness I was taught to cultivate growing up, which leads to a near-perpetual cycle of me beating myself up over getting upset, then trying to fake normalcy, then getting overwhelmed and getting upset, etc.

There are situations, people and things in life that I’ve finally learned to just avoid if at all possible because of the mental fuckery that I know will result if I don’t…but sometimes…

…sometimes I can’t help myself. Sometimes the lure of doing the “normal” thing is too strong. Or, sometimes I know damn well a thing is going to set me off but I care enough about it that I keep subjecting myself to it anyway.

This is what’s been happening with me since Sunday, frankly. I knew as soon as I heard about the shooting in Orlando that I should just back away from social media and let information slowly trickle down to me from my short bursts of NPR exposure during my daily commutes. I knew I should make the conscious decision to not read certain peoples’ posts for a certain amount of time. But I couldn’t look away…I didn’t WANT to look away. I wanted to sit down every gay-hater, every racist, every Islamophobe, every 2nd Amendment spouting gun-nut, and every person who kept sharing that UTTER BULLSHIT post about Wounded Knee and how actually THAT was the worst mass shooting in U.S. history (you know, because it’s a fucking competition) and how it was actually a perfect argument for OMG MOAR GUNS (I’m not even anti-gun, but I am so, SO fucking anti-revisionist-history), and try to make them understand that the arguments they were making just didn’t hold water. Or at least to make MYSELF understand why people can believe such things.

By yesterday afternoon I was DEEPLY angry. I started snapping myself with rubber bands to try and bring myself back to the present, back to what I needed to get done (which, I know, that’s not exactly an A+coping strategy, but I was working with what I had in the situation). Unsurprisingly, it didn’t really work and I started getting That Feeling…the one I half-jokingly call ‘circling the drain’. It’s basically the realization that I’m rushing headlong toward a panic attack if I don’t wise up and get the fuck out of the situation I’m in. I knew that my husband was going to be away for most of the evening and I didn’t want to ask him to cancel his plans (even though I know he would have, had I asked, because he’s awesome), so I reached out to a friend. We met up for ice cream and, as we often do, ended up laughing, telling stories and completely losing track of time. It was 9pm by the time I got home.

And I felt better. SO much better.

It didn’t cure my depression. It didn’t make me an optimist who thinks the world isn’t going to hell in a hand-basket. But it DID help me side-step the imbroglio of anger and sadness. It was respite from the near-constant barrage of awfulness I had been subjecting myself to, and it reminded me of just how lucky I am. Lucky not just for the wonderful people in my life, but lucky to have a life full stop.

The people at Pulse were celebrating Pride. They were celebrating being alive, right before someone stepped in and took it all away. Mourn them, absolutely. Be angry, and rightly fucking so. Fight this culture of hate and bigotry with not just your words but with your deeds and your votes.

And in the midst of all that, try to remember how lucky we are to still be here. Try to remember to live.

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Love is love.

Pocket Trap

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A few weeks back, I went shopping for some summer clothes. I bought, among other things, a pair of white twill capri pants. I have no business owning light-colored pants (or any other light-colored clothing, for that matter) to begin with, but these capri pants wouldn’t quit calling my name while I was wandering around the store (possibly because they actually fit my epic ass, which is a momentous thing. The fitting, not the ass. Well, both actually, but I digress…), so I said fuck it and bought them.

I hung the pants in my closet (only new clothes get hung up. After the first washing it’s laundro-bed all the way), and basically forgot that I bought them until this morning when I realized I was out of clean jeans…aaaand pretty much every other work-appropriate bottom-half covering garment. My options were a) wear the skirt I’m always vaguely uncomfortable in, b) wear the white capri pants, or c) come up with an excuse to work from home so I could just give up on adulting completely and wear yoga pants all day. Since I knew I had a meeting this morning that I couldn’t reschedule, staying home was struck from the list immediately (and sadly. So, so sadly). Vaguely uncomfortable skirt was a total no-go on meeting day as well because I can’t concentrate for shit when I’m self-conscious. So, white capri pants won by default.

Everything was going swimmingly as I got dressed. I even remembered to wear light-colored underpants so that people weren’t pointing and laughing at my shadow-wedgie any time I walked by. ADULT WARDROBING POINTS FOR ME! The capris actually fit even better this morning than when I tried them on in the dressing room, so that was good for a little happy dance. After putting on my shirt, I grabbed my phone and slid it into my pocket.

Except the phone landed on the carpet with a thud.

Because these pants?

THEY HAVE NO POCKETS.

Actually, to put a finer point on it, these pants have something worse than no pockets: they have those bullshit totally non-functional faux pockets:

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Looks like a pocket, doesn’t it? Well it’s NOT a pocket. IT’S A TRAP. A BULLSHIT TRAP.

Because the fashion industry, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that all women are obviously more concerned with smooth lines on their clothing than they are with ACTUAL FUNCTIONALITY.

So now, instead of a slightly misshapen hip (which was going to be covered by my shirt anyway, fashion police), I have a slightly misshapen TIT because the only place I have to stash my phone is in my FREAKING BRA.

How is the threat of potentially short-circuiting my phone with boob sweat (or possibly more importantly, the idea of irradiating my boob with radio waves) a better idea than having pockets in these pants, fashion industry? I mean, granted, you’re not FORCING me to stash my phone in my cleavage. I COULD technically carry it around in my hand every time I get up and go do anything, thus rendering my hands half as useful as they’d be IF I HAD POCKETS.

And true, purses are technically an option that many ladies use. But I need my phone during the day. Do you know how idiotic it would be to have to carry a purse around the office all god damned day? PRETTY IDIOTIC. People would be side-eying me and saying stuff like “Geez, is she carrying coke around with her in that thing or something? And if she’s doing coke, why is she still so fat?”  And then I’d have to be like “bitch, who needs coke when there’s cheese“, which would a) answer the fatness question and b) confuse everyone, and I’d have to explain to them the article that I just linked, except out loud in my own words, which is WAY more difficult for me because I get easily sidetracked talking about stuff like marmots and existentialism and the pros and cons of different forms of magnesium supplements, and basically at that point everybody loses.

The moral of this story, I think, is that if having actual functioning clothing is important to you, then you need to either a) be a man, b) be willing to wear men’s pants (which I’d be totally fine with if I could find ones that actually fit but apparently my Jessica Rabbit-esque waist-to-hip ratio precludes me from having that option), or c) check for pockets BEFORE you buy new pants. And don’t just check that it LOOKS like there are pockets – make sure you can actually get your hand, phone, vial of coke, marmot, or whatever else it is you want to not have to stash in your bra, into said pocket.

Don’t fall for the bullshit faux pocket trap. Let my suffering be a lesson to you all.

 

The ADHD Baker

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You know on all those cooking shows and food blogs where they’re like “MAKE SURE YOU READ THE ENTIRE RECIPE BEFORE STARTING”?

That’s because of people like me – people who find a recipe next to a picture of something they like the looks of and immediately run to the kitchen to start throwing things in a bowl, only to realize halfway through that the recipe says some bullshit like “now let this sit overnight”, or “cook on low heat for at least four hours” and it’s already like 8pm.

Or, halfway through throwing things in the bowl they realize, “fuck, this calls for a whole bunch of turmeric. I don’t have any frigging turmeric. What do I have that tastes LIKE turmeric? Nothing, basically, because turmeric tastes like dirt”.

That’s right, TURMERIC TASTES LIKE DIRT. I’m not saying I don’t like it or that you shouldn’t use it. I’m just saying it tastes like dirt and you know I’m right so cool your fucking jets and keep your pants on or whatever. Jeezis.

turmeric

Also, it kind of looks like cat turds. Who saw turmeric root and was like, “yes, good idea, let’s eat these bright orange dirt-tasting cat turds”?

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yes, recipes being a challenge.

So, with my brand of ADHD, I can have a recipe right in front of me, I can read through it 14 times, I can fully understand the gist of what I’m making and how to make it, I can look at where it says, “1 teaspoon of dirt-tasting turmeric”…and by the time I reach up into the cupboard for the turmeric, I’ve forgotten what the measurement was. Turmeric in hand, I’ll look again but the recipe will now say “3 teaspoons of dirt-tasting turmeric”, because my eyes are reading half of one line and half of another. I’ll think to myself “that seems like a lot, especially since turmeric basically just tastes like dirt”, look at the recipe again, and it will be back to 1 teaspoon and I’ll wonder if I’m hallucinating a tiny bit (possibly due to high turmeric intake).

I usually manage to side-step my brain’s attention shortcomings while cooking by having a strong culinary instinct to begin with (I come from a long line of good cooks), being creative, and keeping my sense of humor about sometimes-ugly-but-usually-still-tasty food.

That’s not really helpful with baking, though. With baking, measuring is important. Paying attention to how your dough acts is important. Not changing 14 things in the recipe on the fly IS IMPORTANT. You can be the second god damned coming of Picasso and have the best sense of humor on Earth but your cake is still going to come out like chocolate-colored sawdust if you don’t measure your flour properly.

I decided I wanted to start baking bread after watching a cooking documentary about fermentation and the history of fermented foods back in the late winter. I’ve long been a fan of fermented foods and I’m a keen believer that the bacteria living in our guts are probably one of the most crucial (and most overlooked) contributors to our overall health. Fermented bread, aka: sourdough, has a much lower glycemic impact than commercial yeast bread, it has more bio-available minerals and vitamins, the gluten proteins have been chemically altered by the bacteria in such a way that they become less inflammatory to the gut and more easy for the body to break down, plus probably a whole load of other happy horse shit.

Point being, I was sold on sourdough. I wanted to make some and it didn’t seem that hard. All you need, after all, is flour, water, salt and patience. Or, if not patience, at least a will to succeed. At least, that’s what a whole bunch of websites told me.

And they weren’t ENTIRELY wrong…but they left out a motherfucking TRUCKLOAD of details, it turns out. Like, temperature is almost as important as measuring your ingredients…and I’m not talking oven temperature, I’m talking ambient temperature in your kitchen from the time you start mixing your dough until the time you put it into the oven. Also, bread dough acts differently depending on the humidity level in your kitchen. Different types of flour (just wheat flour, mind you…I’m not subbing like, crystalized unicorn tears or anything) absorb different amounts of water depending on not only whether they’re whole grain or not, but also whether they’re winter wheat, spring wheat, red wheat, and apparently what fucking PHASE OF THE MOON THEY GERMINATED IN. I swear to god it’s like the most ridiculously convoluted thing ever. There’s actual note taking involved, people. COME ON. “It’s just flour, water and salt”, my ass.

But somehow, it works (usually). And I love it. And not just because I get to have delicious toast in the mornings or give away pretty loaves of bread to appreciative friends. I’ve found working with bread dough to be so…I don’t know, meditative, I guess. It has its own rhythm and once you start a batch, you’re just sort of along for the ride. Except you can’t just be the co-pilot who sleeps the whole ride because you have to be aware of what the dough is doing, how it’s progressing. You have to be ready to move it from one phase to the next, but not until the dough itself is ready. It’s kind of like a pet that is independent and likes to do its own thing but that is also a little bit derpy and needs you to keep an eye on them so they don’t like, chew on wires and stuff. That got weird, but I think you get my drift.

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It totally looks like a brain when you cut it in half. Complete with nuts even!

 

 

 

Too Hot To Squirrel

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It’s been hot here lately. Not just normal summer-level hot (even though it’s not even summer yet AND I live in the sub-arctic tundra that is Vermont so we practically don’t even GET summer. We get like six months of winter, a month of mud season, two weeks of black fly season, six weeks of mosquito-and-thunderstorm season, and two months of fall. Also, I stopped doing the math on that a while back so don’t send me hate mail if it doesn’t add up. LALALA CAN’T HEAR YOU).

Anyway.

I’m talking, it’s been a lot hotter than it should be. Hot as balls. Scorching hot.

Hot. In. Herre.

I’m that asshole that doesn’t even really like summer, by the way. I mean, summer is ok in principle. Things are green and pretty, stuff smells good (once rotten lilac season has passed, anyway), and it stays light until like 9pm. Also, campfires and s’mores. I think of all these things and I’m like, “YAY, SUMMERRRR!”.

But then summer actually gets here and it’s like a fucking greenhouse built INSIDE a jungle that’s living INSIDE a terrarium (are terrariums hot? I know they’re damp, at least. APPLICABLE. I’m keeping it.), and I just…can’t. I used to think it was because I’m a life-long fatty but the older I get the more I realize that I just  have cold blood (which is different than being cold-blooded. I don’t bask and I can’t lick my eyeballs). I’m clearly at least part wildling. My optimum operational range is like 25 to 75 degrees. I can walk around outside in yoga pants and a sweatshirt at 25 degrees with no problem, but above 75 degrees I’m usually red-faced, sweating and pining for a pool to jump into.

So, this weekend when it was 95 degrees and fuck-this-noise percent humidity, I just refused to leave the apartment. We watched TV, we played video games, we puttered around the kitchen. One of these trips through the kitchen was when something outside caught my eye:

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That, my friends, is a resounding “UGH, WHY” in squirrel body language.

Have you ever seen a more unimpressed looking squirrel in your life? Look at the dangle-y paws. She’s the embodiment of rodent ennui. “L‘écrou? Non. Le siiiiiigh…” she murmurs as she takes a puff off her tiny squirrel cigarette wand.  We’re pretty close to the Quebec border, after all. Francophone squirrels could totally be a thing here. Probably not cigarette-smoking ones, though.

Also, sidenote: I think this squirrel is pregnant, which may be the source of at least some of her hot-weather ennui. She had a litter back in March, but it’s not uncommon for squirrels to have a second litter when there’s plenty of food around. And seeing as how these little bastards have been sucking down birdseed (provided by me) since about November, I’d say food conditions are pretty friggin’ ideal for them. She’s been stuffing her face even more than usual lately and is looking overly rotund again. Not that I’m one to judge.

Anyway, point being, it was too hot to even squirrel here over the weekend. Here’s hoping for some more rodent- and me-friendly weather, at least until summer TECHNICALLY gets here.

bad brain days

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It’s difficult to explain a bad brain day to a non-depressed person. They usually want to know what went wrong, what caused you to have a bad day. The thing is, I can’t usually answer that question.

I mean, yes…some days go to shit for very specific reasons that you can point directly to. And lots of days just kind of bob along in that nebulous area between “ok” and “not ok”.

But when you’re dealing with depression there are also these days that are just…bad. The things you normally get done with no problem become an epic struggle. Stuff that usually amuses you or cheers you up just serves to remind you of how fucking miserable you are. It could be perfect weather, your spouse could make you the best breakfast, you could have the most traffic-free commute to work while all your favorite songs played on the radio…and the day would still be shit, because your brain just isn’t cooperating.

Hence, bad brain day.

Today was one of those days for me.  I woke up in a fine mood, had a nice breakfast with my husband and my dog, got ready for work, and everything was copacetic. I was fine for about the first hour of work and then it just hit me out of nowhere.

First I was annoyed by someone not responding to an email in a timely fashion. Which, that seems semi-reasonable at first glance but the degree of my annoyance was WAY disproportionate to the importance of the issue the email dealt with. Like, if emails were gambling and I was mad about losing money, I was in the “I just lost $200” range when really the email was only worth about $5.75. Which made more sense in my head, but whatever.

Then I started berating myself for being mad about the email, followed swiftly by berating myself for berating myself (I KNOW…welcome to my world). Within minutes things had snowballed to the point where I was hiding in the bathroom because I couldn’t stop myself from crying.

What was I actually crying about? Existing, basically. That’s about as close as I can come to an honest explanation. It’s not even that I don’t WANT to exist. I do! I like existing! BEING ALIVE IS RAD! It’s just that sometimes it hurts simply to exist, let alone actually get anything done or have any kind of meaningful interactions with the world.

On days like this about the best I can do is let myself have a crying jag or two (or ten, ugh), try to get on with what needs doing afterward, and hope that tomorrow my brain gets back with the program.

How do YOU describe your bad brain days, your down days, your hide-in-the-bathroom-at-work days to others? Do you have some kind of code word or phrase you use to clue your loved ones in to the fact that you’re in a bad place? Talk to me, Goose.

Err…Geese, I guess, since there’s more than one of you…

Brain Weasel Fight Club Practice…uhh…Club

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I really like making people laugh. That moment when someone goes from just politely listening to actually laughing, their whole face lights up and for a short time they radiate waves of happiness. In turn, my brain sucks up that radiating happiness like a sponge. It’s like something inside of me throws the doors wide open and is all “HELLO GOOD FEELS, I HAVE BEEN EAGERLY AWAITING YOU. PLEASE COME IN, I HAVE PREPARED REFRESHMENTS”, and it just feels really, really good.

Maybe that makes me a psychic vampire or something? I don’t know. I’ve been called worse, I guess.

Anyway.

The thing about depression is that it lies. Not just once in a while, but constantly. Even on my good days, it’s still there. It’s either just not lying as loudly as on the bad days, or maybe my inner Lying Cat is awake and reminding me of what the depression is doing.

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Lying Cat is a character in the graphic novel series “Saga” written by Brian K. Vaughan and drawn by Fiona Staples. It’s really, REALLY good and you should read it.

This often makes it quite difficult to trust that what I think is funny in my head will a) come out as funny when I say or type it, and b) that the audience I’m addressing will see it as funny. Comedy is subjective, after all. One woman’s Ferris Bueller is another woman’s…Wolf Blitzer.

Or something.

You know what I mean.

So basically, I spend a lot of time with a blank page in front of me, berating myself for not writing anything on it because nothing is ever good enough. This is completely fucking counterproductive, because the only way to get better at a thing is to PRACTICE. Every day that I let this blank page intimidate me into slinking off into non-writing land is an opportunity to practice that I’m losing out on.

And granted, some days  I just…can’t. Either I’m busy or I’m just truly lacking the spoons to string words together meaningfully…whatever. Shit happens. You wouldn’t try to practice playing the clarinet if you had bronchitis and couldn’t breathe well (I’m assuming. I’ve never actually played the clarinet. CLARINETS, HOW DO THEY WORK?!), and I’m not going to try to practice writing on days when it feels like my fucking brain is dissolving and getting ready to leak out my ears. But I feel like maybe I need to start making myself practice even when I don’t feel exactly “on”, when I don’t have a funny story in the chamber all ready to fire…and yes, even when my brain is trying to tell me that nobody wants to read a single word I could possibly type in this space.

Because honestly, it’s not just writing practice. It’s fight practice. It’s shadow-boxing with the smaller, more docile brain weasels so that I’m a little better prepared when those big sweaty Ivan Drago type brain weasels inevitably roll up wanting to pummel me and steal my lunch money.

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My husband will be so proud I remembered a character’s name from one of the terrible movies he’s made me watch!

So bear with me if I start posting boring shit about like, my house plants, the weather, or my obsession with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. It can’t be all cookie licking and floor poops all of the time, y’know?

party pooper

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I usually take my mom out for breakfast on Mother’s Day. Most of the local diners and restaurants around here run Mother’s Day specials and are usually super busy because of it. Neither my mom nor I are big fans of loud, busy places with lots of people, so I figured I’d scout around and find somewhere less populated to take her this year. There’s a very pretty little seasonal place not terribly far from where we live – they do local produce, farm to table, all that hippie jazz that I love. I saw a post on the local ListServ that they’d be open for Mother’s Day brunch this year so I pitched it to mom. She liked the idea so I made us a reservation and we spent the next week or so talking about what we might order when we got there (because that’s what we do. We’re menu-holics).

We got to the place and were apparently the first party of the day because there were no other cars around. We were greeted at the door and led to our table by a young woman with very impressive calves – the kind of calves that made me want to ask her what kind of exercises she does. I’m pretty sure she could have cracked walnuts with her calves, is what I’m saying. They were serious business calves.

Anyway.

We sat down at our little table and admired the decor: barn-board floors, funky little pieces of art hung on the walls, wee little green glass vases with two bright yellow daffodils in them at each table. The room we were in had windows along two sides and the third side had French doors that opened out onto a lovely little terrace. We finally tore our eyes away from the rolling sweep of acres of lush green field outside and starter perusing the menu (which, let’s be honest, we already has memorized). Ms. Impressive Calves led another party in and sat them at a table across the room…and that’s when I saw it.

There, not four feet away from us on the tastefully patterned area rug…

…was a dog turd.

I actually did a double-take because I literally didn’t believe what I was seeing. The idea that there was a dog turd on the floor next to us in this fancy restaurant was so preposterous that for about fifteen seconds I fully believed that I was, in fact, hallucinating. I looked across at my mom, who was blithely nattering on about the virtues of sangria versus mimosas. Feeling the weight of my stare, she looked up at me and raised her eyebrows.

“What?”

I leaned in and whispered:

“There’s shit on the rug.”

She glanced at the rug directly next to her and shook her head slightly.

“Whaaaat? I don’t see anything.”

“It’s right there, LOOK. It’s definitely a dog turd.”  I pointed urgently with the corner of my menu, down at the aisle between my seat and the table in the center of the room. She leaned over a little and looked again.

“Ohhh my godddd…” she hissed, her eyes widening as she looked back at me. We both started giggling hysterically.

“What do we DO? Do we say something? I don’t think we should say anything. Oh my god, how embarrassing…”, I wheezed between fits of giggling.

“We HAVE to tell them. What if someone steps in it?!”

Just then our server rounded the corner. A tall, broad and solidly built woman with high cheekbones, a snub nose and smiling eyes, she looked for all the world like she could have been my cousin. She had an assortment of interesting tattoos on her arms and wore chunky Dansko clogs.  She asked for my drink order and to my horror, all I could picture was her stepping back a couple inches and landing her heel in the dog turd. I looked back down at the menu and stuttered that I’d like a sangria. My mom ordered the same and then, just as cool as a cucumber, she leaned in toward the server and dropped her voice a bit.

“Hon, does someone around here have a small dog?”

The server looked slightly perplexed.

“Yes, the owners do. Why? Oh no, are you allergic?”  Her eyes went wide. My mom smiled charmingly.

“Oh no, not allergic. But, ummm…”  She used her menu to gesture at the floor behind the server. The server tilted her head, clearly thinking my mom was daft as fuck, only to then turn around and see the petite ordure perilously close to her shoe.

“Ohmygod NO. Oh, I’m so, SO sorry. I’ll get that taken care of right away.”

Mom and I both assured her repeatedly as she picked up the poop and spot-cleaned the carpet that it was totally not a big deal to us, that we both had small dogs ourselves and had seen our fair share of poop, etc. The server was clearly mortified but our continued commiserations seemed to settle her, and by the time our entrees came out she was able to laugh about it with us. She insisted that she comp us a dessert despite our protestations (not that we sent the flourless chocolate cake back to the kitchen once it showed up, mind you), and when she brought our check she said she’d comped one of our drinks as well. She really didn’t have to do that – the laughs we got were well worth the price of admission in our opinion.

Needless to say, it was a Mother’s Day that at least the three of us won’t be forgetting any time soon!