My New Year Comes Late

I'm not much for celebrating the change of calendar years, but I do like to take a quick inventory of the past year when I've successfully lived another 365 days.  In other words, it's my birthday and amid the fun times with my awesome friends and family, I like to sprinkle in some thinkin'.

Yesterday evening I had a lengthy and fairly intense conversation with one of my favorite people about depression, empathy, and general philosophy.  Specifically, we talked about what it means to be smart and depressed, what it feels like to be "over" empathic in a culture that doesn't, despite its best intentions and platitudes, value empathy (and how it's often perceived as kind of creepy), the relative insignificance/importance of a single human being on macro- and microcosmic scales, and how we understand our personal context and the larger human historical context in the world within an atheist framework.   And contrary to how that probably sounds, it was one of the most engaging, funny, uplifting conversations I've had in a while.

I will mark this year as the year I got happy and the beginning of my radicalization (it's short way to radical in these gross political times, by the way). Strange conceptual bedfellows, a bit, but definitely symbiotic .  Being happy means I have the luxury of engaging with the world outside in way that is vigorous and positive.  Even when I'm seething with indignation about this or that injustice or ranting about letters to the editor, I know it's because I like life and it matters to me that this world is good.  For the record, I recognize the nearly unbearable earnestness of statements like that and even that feels like a triumph, even if it makes you, dear reader, barf just a little.  Take that, increasingly-marginalized cynical Meg!

What cropped up over and over again in the conversation last night was the idea that being responsible for your own happiness is maybe the defining responsibility of a person's life.  Complaining that things are terrible and vaguely hoping they spontaneously get better is a miserably inefficient solution, and one that has ripple effects through other people's lives. Prayer is complaining and really hoping things will spontaneously get better.  Next week or next month or next year are not more magical than right now.  Your future is happening by seconds, now, now, now, now, now, again now. Be kind now.  Appreciate the good things now.  I'd cite the Serenity Prayer, but I don't want anyone to wait for a god to give them serenity or courage or wisdom: Accept the things you can't change, change the things you can, take yourself off autopilot and figure out which are which.  It sounds incredibly simple, to the point of being meaningless, but in practice those three tasks are very, very difficult.  A lot of terrible things happen.  A lot of frustrating things happen.  Sometimes those things will happen continuously for kind of a long time and there's nothing you can do about it.  I've let that stuff own me plenty and all it got me was a double dose of misery.  Sometimes the bright spots to focus on belong to a friend or a stranger in a news story, but being happy for those bright spots beats wallowing, defeated, in a dungeon of suffering.  It's easy to let yourself off the hook. Sometimes I have to remind myself out loud.

Here's a useful object lesson:  I started writing this post this morning before I met friends for lunch.  I was supposed to go visit my father afterwards.  I thought he was being impatient and calling me at 1 and again a half-hour later, but as it turns out it was his neighbor calling to tell me that Medcu was taking my dad to the hospital.  I got to the building as they were leaving, gave them his basic info and told them I'd meet them at the hospital.  The facts aren't in yet, but he probably had another in a series of seizures following a stroke more than 8 years ago.  It's not serious in the sense that it's unlikely to be fatal, but it will quite possibly mean the end of his independence, something he's fought tooth and nail for over the years. We think this every time, though, and every time he manages a miraculous recovery, just slightly more impaired than before the latest event.

What I've learned from doing this over and over and over again is that I can start fretting now about how this might all turn out, or I can take the simple steps necessary to ensure his care, check in with the hospital, maybe revisit some of the information from last time.  I can go hold his hand and let him try to communicate using one or two words, which is usually what he's left with after these events.  I can laugh at the very funny two-way text exchange I'm having with friends, take care of a couple of tasks for the part-time job I recently took on, be grateful for the flurry of birthday wishes on facebook, go to dinner with my boyfriend and consider what a really rich, loving, mutually respectful life we lead together and how excited I am about the plans we've put in action.

I can't make my dad not sick, the best I can do is...well, the best I can do and falling down a rabbit hole of negative speculation won't do anything good for anybody.

It's not quite where I thought I was going with this when I started, but I guess it's actually pretty close.

This new year's off to a rousing start!

Giant Marshmallow Pillow -- Yeah!

When I started this blog I was like, "Hey, everything's so awesome! I can't wait to see what awesome stuff's obviously just about to happen every second from now until forever!  I'm going to document all that awesome here in this space, just watch! Yay!"

Well, yeah.  I meant to, and I really do, actually, experience the majority of my life as a series of awesome events.  The things is that I'm also a little bit hermit-y and if I were to write about the things that make me the happiest and most excited on any kind of regular basis, what we'd have here would be a collection of adorable cat pictures and stories and a series of groaningly punny dialogues between me and my boyfriend and/or one or both of us talking to the cat.

Also, for all the fist shaking and righteous indignation on the page, having the energy to invest in larger social issues is a luxury that depressed-me couldn't afford (or was too miserly to budget for).  Despite appearances, it's a sign of mental health.  But, depending on your taste, maybe less fun than the rainbows and unicorns I seemed to be promising in the beginning.

And I like it.  I like my over-long and thinky entries.  I like my old smart friends who leave comments and the new friends I've acquired because they're smart and leave comments. I like that even though there aren't a ton of readers, at least some portion of my stats are actual human beings and not click-back bots.

Now you say, "Get to the point, Ramblin' Rose!"

And I say, "Right. Anyway, I'm leaving this business just the way it is, but for those of you with a taste for fly-by-night animation and the disassociative short fiction of dreams, I made a fun blog."


Go now, my pretties.

Seriously, though, how awesome is he?

I'm In Love With the USPS And I Don't Care Who Knows It

One of several boxes of cherished letters.

My father was a carrier with the U.S. Postal Service for nearly 30 years before an early stroke forced him into retirement.  It was a good job, and by contemporary standards maybe a dream job. Under a collective bargaining agreement negotiated by one of the largest public employee unions in the country, he took home a comfortable pay check, enjoyed substantial health benefits for himself and for me, and accrued a pension, something that's become something of a mythical beast of benefits.  In exchange he reported for work before dawn in an atmosphere that was toxic (in part thanks to an extremely adversarial union/management relationship) and made his appointed rounds through rain and snow and heat and gloom of night.

When my grandfather (himself a USPS veteran) suggested I take the civil service exam and go into the family business, my father told me he's never let me "work on the floor with those animals."  I was willing to take his word on that.  When a man who is himself crass, sexist and somewhat racist tells you it's a rough crowd, well, that's good enough for me.

Ironically, one of the hats I wear in my current job is USPS contract employee, picking up and delivering island mail from the processing and distribution center in Scarborough.  I love it there.  The plant itself has a Rube Goldberg quality that I enjoy, and I've developed a jovial, affectionate relationship with most of the people who work there.  At this point, starting pay as a carrier would be a significant pay cut and the grousing of my buddies there confirms that I'm better off where I am in a workplace where the culture is more like a family than a business, but there's a part of me that wishes I'd taken my grandfather's advice way back when.

Of course these days the postal service is considered a sinking ship.  Facing an enormous budget shortfall, there's talk of cutting Saturday service and smaller branches exist under perpetual threat of closure.  I can't even count the number of times I've heard the phrase, "No wonder the postal office is going under..." recently.  This bothers me.  A lot.

I Enjoy Being a Girl

Facial hair=competent, right?

 You know how sometimes you bump into someone and apologize and back up and knock something over and apologize and lean over to pick it up and hip check someone and pretty soon you're in this sort semi-comic nightmare vortex of apology?  I think that might happen in a second.  Bear with me.

Some people will read this and think I'm an insult to feminism and its hard-won gains.  Some people will think I'm being simultaneously a boring scold and a whiny, selfish baby and, on the whole, too sensitive feministy altogether.  Some people will probably just think I'm a frivolous nincompoop who spends an awful lot of time pontificating on things that really don't deserve it. Oh, and let's not forget that I'll be using broad strokes and will undoubtedly be accused of stereotyping. As far as what I actually am, well, probably most of it's at least partially true.  Except for the stereotype thing, where I hope you'll accept that I'm not speaking for all women, about all men in all circumstances. Call me out if I really hit a nerve, but I can almost guarantee it'll be something I'm shorthanding for the purpose of the discussion.  So then: sorry for not being a credit to my gender, sorry for being so tetchy, sorry I'm a nitwit, sorry for extrapolating generalized scenarios from shallow experience pools.  Sorry for apologizing in advance. I hate when people do that.  Welcome to the nightmare vortex.

Does This Urban Outfit Make Me Look Fatuous?

Urban Outfitters is putting on a crazy push to finish their store in downtown Portland, Maine.

As I walked by tonight, it occurred to me that although having a national chain plunked down in the midst of the Old Port, our charming little enclave of locally-owned boutiques, feels a little yicky, it's actually a weird testament to the strength and success of our small businesses.  Urban Outfitters isn't interested in atmosphere, it's interested in cash, and the fact that it made sense to them to take up real estate downtown instead of somewhere in the strip mall wasteland that is South Portland is kind of like a high five to the business owners who've grown the area over the past few decades.  You know, the kind of high five you get from your mortal enemy who's super passive aggressive but who it's way easier to just make nice with than face their mean-girl vengeance if you snub them.

If I were the kind of person who paid for clothes instead of scavenging cast offs from friends and making my own from bed linens, I'd think, "Ooh. Urban Outfitters' clearance rack is totally like retail junk food and junk food is so fun.  But I'ma make a concerted effort to get my metaphorical fashion groceries at local stores too, because they're the reason there's even anything in this area besides rats and dive bars.  And I'm never, ever going to buy anything from UO with writing in a foreign language I don't speak, because of that one time when Tricia used her Japanese lessons and realized that they had a T-shirt that said, 'I'm a stupid white person' and she splurged and bought it because it was so hilarious that people who couldn't read it were wearing it because oriental-fetishism was at its peak in the late-90's and it totally scandalized our friend Yuko and Tricia's Japanese hair dresser, both of whom assumed she'd misunderstood."

That, friends, is exactly what I would think.

Do You Believe Everything You Read in Sketchy Online Publications?

We are gullible people.  This is, I realize, a sweeping and imprecise statement, and to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure quite who I mean by we, but I mean it and I consider it to be one of the most dangerous threats facing humanity. Wait, wait...do I mean more dangerous than nuclear armament, global warming and unrest in the Middle East?  Why yes, yes I do.  Because all of those by and large the physical threats to our future as a species are governed by people who make decisions about the stewardship of weapons and fossil fuels and rubber bullets based on their assessment of the information available to them.  In other words, nuclear bombs don't kill people, people kill people, and if people run around just a-believin' every bit of crackpot data that crosses their path, we're some kind of fucked, gang.

I've mentioned journalism and my previous life in the profession in passing a couple of times on this blog in some offhanded ways, but I've recently become fixated on some very specific and very pressing concerns regarding the fourth estate that bear examination.

On my recent trip to New York, I was hosted by someone I knew only very slightly having met her and hit it off when she was a potential ferry passenger and I was stuck in the glass box of my ticket booth. When I got off the bus and she hugged me and gave me keys to her apartment, we'd spent a total of 45 minutes, tops, talking to each other face to face and exchanged a handful of delightful emails over the months that followed.  She's a Columbia School of Journalism-trained professional and freelances for a number of papers including the Boston Globe, the Village Voice and the New York Daily News.  On the second day of my visit, we had a lengthy and passionate discussion of the current state and future of journalism, including the advent of the citizen journalist.  She feels strongly that there ought to be a distinction between professional reporting and crowd-sourced material.  While I tend to be more willing to entertain the possibility that a layman might produce copy worth considering, I share some of her concerns in that I'm not sure that consumers are diligent enough to deal with the responsibility of sorting through the wealth of information reported by non-institutional news sources (or reputable media --cough, Judith Miller, cough-- but that's another story).

Black Friday at the Church of Stop Shopping

On the eve of the day known, depending on where your head's at, as Black Friday or Buy Nothing Day, and heading into a season that tries super hard to make shopping feel like a warm, sparkly, snow-dusted hug, I'm going to take a few loose ends that have been kicking around my brain, weave them into a scarf of a blog entry and give it to you as a gift.

I've never been a huge fan of shopping, with the exception of groceries, which I love beyond reason.  I do like looking at stuff, but somehow poking around with the intention of buying things is a special ring of my personal hell. 

Which is why the very concept of Black Friday makes my head spin. For a girl who likes to take late night walks because I can pretend there's no one else in the city, being jammed  into aisles with dozens of other people is positively claustrophobic.  I dislike being stuck in line with those radically inefficient types who sigh and shuffle and hurrumph at how long it's taking but begin the inevitably long, arduous search for their wallet only when they hear their total.  I dislike cranky, snippy people. People in lines are cranky and snippy. I dislike being cranky and snippy. I become cranky and snippy. Enough.  The particulars aren't important, but you get the idea.  I'm petty and precious and sad, and I can't hack it in the fluorescent lit jungle of Retail Land.  But actively seeking this experience on a day when you're guaranteed the biggest, most aggressive, adrenalized crowds of the year?  How does anyone find that appealing?

Well, sales, stupid. Crazy sales intended to satisfy the already crazy and induce a sense of urgency and madness in those not yet over the edge.  And in a bad economy, the siren song of the discount flat screen gets turned up to eleven.

This is old news, but it's worth examining this year maybe more than others because of...yes, Occupy.  I realize I'm probably starting to sound like an Occupy zealot, but bear with me here.