Constant Craving

Ok, so I owe you all an explanation. I've been blogging a lot less than I used to. And I don't post pictures of my meals with recipes anymore. And I don't do any baking to speak of. I haven't had the time or the energy. I've had bouts of really sad times balanced by good but busy and productive times. I'm working on posting more. I'm working on lots of things.

I am super proud of myself for my most recent accomplishment. My dissertation is in the hands of a good editor, and I'm turning it in in a couple of weeks for printing. But it's done. No extra work needed. That, in an of itself is a big effing deal. I get that. I do.

And I got to go home! I missed it much more than I realized. It was nice to see my family and friends, and even nicer to have something to celebrate while I was there. Seeing my friends and the old hood was pretty cool too.

While I don't want this blog to be a "pity me" blog, it bears mentioning that the day after I got back,  instead of ushering in a few weeks of rest and relaxation, my job situation really tanked.

Remember how I work at Wolfram & Hart, the evil law firm? And remember how they had me doing horrible foreclosure hotline stuff, where I'd have to talk to people who were losing their homes and tell them that they had to pay huge sums of money within a week or their house will be sold? Well that stuff sucked and was shitty. Also apparently a lot of it wasn't too legal. My firm is being sued in a class action lawsuit (along with our clients, big giant banks). This has resulted in a massive amount of layoffs.

My friends at work started to disappear. The week I got back, they started laying off people in batches of 15. Then they slowed down. Then I got transferred again. This time, to a department that handles out-of-state cases. Then they started laying off people again. Important people. People needed to get things done. People who have worked there for 15 years. People who were in the middle of celebrating their birthday. Yeah, that's right, one guy got fired ON his birthday. It hasn't been a month since I went out to LA for my defense and yet a huge amount of people at my firm are gone and each day has been incredibly stressful. Every time the phone rings, we jump because it might be HR asking for a private meeting. Even some of the demon lawyers are gone! Demon on demon crime, you guys! It's a crap shoot each day that I'll have a job. Which means an apartment and medical insurance and CABLE TV.

Anyway, I have been a stress ball each day all day! If I don't have a job, we're screwed. M. hasn't found decent employment, we've got a dwindling savings, and none of my teaching applications have yielded much in the way of even one adjunct class. I can't even get any kind of academic adjacent job.


I've tried to love Philly. I love parts of it a lot. But a year should be enough time to get a spot teaching one class as an adjunct with a PhD. And if M. can't get a decent job after applying for over 300 positions (ranging from full time benefited to hourly retail), then I think we have to reassess our long term plans. The major reason we came was to have a better financial future.

We're thinking of moving back to Long Beach. We've done some soul searching about it. M wanted to move back 6 months ago, but I thought we owed it to ourselves to give it one year. Now that the dissertation is done, I feel like I can finally think clearly about what I need and what I love to do.

Until I finished, I felt like it would take forever. I felt like I'd never be done. I was running in place for a long time. Doing whatever I could to avoid the work that needed to get done.  And now that the work is done and I'm actually proud of it, I feel like a million bucks. And Wolfram & Hart is destroying this million bucks feeling. They are tearing into tiny tiny pieces and crushing each piece.

I've got a very possible job situation happening in January 2012. A good one. One with possibilities for the future. One that would make it very easy to move back to Long Beach. I think it's happening. And I think I'm happy at the prospect. Some people would look at this Philly thing as a failed experiment. But I look at it as my last chance to do a big crazy move, to experience totally new things, to understand myself better.

I want to not be stressed out all the time. It's really messing with my mind and my body. And I want my husband to be happy. And this war of ovarian aggression will one day end. I want to be on the winning side of that one. Sigh. I've given up on the need to be a homeowner. I've looked at enough awful mortgages and ruined lives at Wolfram & Hart to never ever sign a mortgage. Not until I've got real stability and a hefty savings. And I've started to be OK with that. I can have a rental house someday. And I can take good care of it like it was my own until things get better.

So this was an apology (for being gone), an explanation (for why I've been gone), and an indication of what's coming.

Wish me some luck already, damn!

Night Turns Into Day

All of the art in this post is by Natalie Dee

Mornings are tough for the unemployed. Sure, at first you're getting up at a decent hour, showering and getting dressed, making coffee, having a bowl of cereal, checking email and looking for jobs. Then you start staying up later and watching movies until midnight on a Wednesday, so you get up a little later on Thursday. You still make coffee, get that bowl of cereal, look for jobs, writing, what have you, but just a little later. And maybe you save the shower for mid-morning.

You figure out that this could be over any day now. You could get a 9-5 and have to be up when it's still dark out. I mean, like that could happen tomorrow! So you let yourself enjoy a little late night reading and when the bed looks so warm and inviting after taking the dog for a his morning walk, you feel like you should take advantage of this beautiful time and snuggle up with a dog that also looooves sleeping in.

You say to yourself, "don't feel guilty, when you're working this will be a fond memory." You try to push away the realization that while snuggling, you are also anxious, because you really don't have to leave the house today, and that feels weird. 

You start to get a little bummed out when you wake up because there's nowhere to rush off to, so you sleep in more and breakfast starts to look a lot like lunch. I swear, I have had days where I get a bunch of stuff done in the morning and keep going going all day. Writing, doing bills, figuring out how to get medical care,  junk like that. And then I'll have a totally lazy day where I get up late and take a nap! I have so much time now and it feels like I'm either too anxious to enjoy it. Anxiety, by the way, does not make for good writing. My writing has been really sloppy and I've had the hardest time getting down my thoughts on paper the way I see them in my head. I need a reset button. I'd like to reset to the feeling I had when the apartment was finally free of the last box and my hopes were ridiculously high.

What if I start to get really odd from not having regular decent work relationship contact with people? Like how professors get when they go on sabbaticals that involve researching Civil War-era documents in a library in some small town. I remember one professor I knew looked confused when I said hello after a sabbatical. Not because they didn't know me, but because the situation of being talked to while they were thinking and processing was a strain.

What I'm basically saying here is that I'm not doing bad, but I'm not really doing good. I'm doing OK.

On days where I'm just OK, I'm less likely to post. I've hit a strange point, and not only because it is 3am on a Tuesday (or technically Wednesday). Though in retrospect, maybe check-ins with my psyche shouldn't be done at the witching hour. But having nothing new to write about...sucks. Here's hoping things change soon. I mean, it's Dracula Month so I have that going on. But it would be cool for things to start looking up on any of my fronts, Universe. Yeah, I called the Universe out just now, so what?

Ok, rambletron 3000 has been powered down.....

Maybe tomorrow I'll tell you all about my magical adventures in the nation's first library? Where you can almost hear the ghosts of library patron freaks of the distant past....

Prozac Nation

I don't know how many of you are on anti-depressants, but according to CDC statistics, they are the most prescribed drugs in the US. They are prescribed for all sorts of things, but mostly for people who display certain emotional criteria. If you have a depressive episode, which many people over 25 usually do, and you go in to your doctor, it's fairly easy to meet that emotional criteria.

My grandmother had severe depressive episodes in addition to an obsessive compulsive disorder. Her house was always closed up in the winter time, curtains drawn, in bed, the whole bit. To this day I find that opening the curtains in the morning is one of the more important things I do. Letting light in is a big deal. She used to clean silverware with bleach after certain people whom she considered to be not clean enough came for dinner. She bleached the hell out of everything. Many a morning my mother leaned over the kitchen counter in the kitchen to find a line of bleach on her shirt. She showered constantly. She was obsessed with killing any and all flies that entered her home. She needed there to be at least one gallon of milk in the refrigerator at all times. She was funny and she knew how to make you laugh, but she had obsessions that were debilitating and straining at times.

My mom lived with these moments her whole life. My grandmother was convinced she was going to die early and talked about it. In my grandmother's defense, her life before she had kids was no picnic. She could easily have been dealing with the demons of her experiences. But I wonder if it is genetic. Certainly depression may run in families as a result of environmental factors, and it must be hard to distinguish that from genetics in a study. The most they've come up with is that it's possible to inherit a vulnerability.

I've always been kind of an anxious person, a little prone to compulsion when it comes to things like keeping my environment neat and tidy. I feel very good when I see lines on the carpet after vacuuming. I feel like a clean apartment is brighter, with more space and air. I need the paper towels and toilet paper to go "over" and not "under," and I will change them when I see they are not. When my in-laws came to visit the first time (which also coincided with my mother visiting our apt. for the first time) I cleaned every single piece of silverware and put it in the drawer in an organized way. I scrubbed every surface of my apartment. There is a funny story in my family of my grandmother visiting my aunt in her first home and stepping inside only to go right to the oven and open the door. Of course, the oven was one place she didn't feel she needed to scrub. She was wrong. So I scrubbed like hell. And my mother-in-law was just happy to see us, she didn't seem to care about how clean my apartment was. My mom, of course, went to the bathroom and pulled the shower door to see if I had cleaned the tub. Every faucet gleams, every floorboard is dustless when I'm on a cleaning tear. It's ridiculous. I'm a perfectionist in a lot of ways, which makes me anxious and anxiety sucks. I get TMJ, so my jaw gets tight. My dentist was surprised that I needed more than ibuprofen to deal with it and prescribed a muscle relaxant because I was so "high strung." You know what high strung people hate? Being called out for being high strung, dentist guy. Geez.

When I was having a "depressive episode" a couple years ago I finally decided to talk to someone about it. A friend of mine told me that since she'd been on anti-depressants, things were much easier to deal with and she was much happier. I made an appointment with my HMO's psychiatric center. They were really fascinated with my compulsive stuff. They asked all kinds of questions like "What happens when you find that the paper towels are under? How do you react?" You know, to see if I go on a psycho frenzy. But my anxiety and bummed out situation led to the prescription of Prozac. Or, at least its generic, fluoxetine. Some piddly little amount.

I was more open and less focused on minutiae, I felt easy going as a teacher (btw, great job choice for an ocd, anxiety ridden, shy perfectionist, right?), and I wasn't as concerned with perfection. I went to therapy for a minute, but that was a disaster. One doctor told me to deal with my anxiety over finances and not having enough time by hiring someone from a service called "My Man in India" to do all my bill paying for me."It's very cheap," she said. Modern day colonialism, a solution for all! Every solution to my problems seemed to come from Stephen Covey's 7 Habits for Highly Effective People. Like I needed more numeric lists in my life.

Recently I realized that I've been on this stuff for years. It was only supposed to be for a few months, until I was able to motivate to work on the dissertation (my main reason for being depressed). So I gradually weaned myself off and now I'm drug-free. Want to know what's changed? Nothing. I don't think it really did much anymore. Maybe it's what they prescribe to people like me that aren't clinically depressed, as sort of a placebo. It's not like I'm in some happy great place in my life, believe me there are things to be super bummed about. But I'm not, at least not as much as I could be, given my genetic pre-disposition. Maybe it's too soon to tell, but I have to say, I think it gave me the license to be more laid back, to fight anxiety, to be more confident in my abilities as a teacher. Maybe it just allowed me to give myself permission more than it messed with my chemistry. Or maybe my grandmother's life-long struggle with depression made me think that every bout of the blues was part of a cylce that would lead toward my self-emposed entombment in my bedroom for months at a time.

Hello, overshare! I just thought I'd let you in on some good news in my life. Don't think my story means you can just cut out your drugs or that I've joined Scientology. It doesn't work the same for everyone and some of you probably need some chemical maintenance. If anything, my story should encourage you not to be insured through an HMO. Maybe I would have gotten better psychiatric care had there been someone who didn't just have a checklist in front of them and a bookshelf full of self-help titles.

Debbie Downer

One of the best things about "summers off" is that I start to lose track of the days of the week. I always know when it's Friday or Monday, but those days in between-not so much. It's nice, and I'm sure several of you would like it if I shut up right now, but today it reminds me that I haven't done as much as I would have liked to by this point in the summer.

I'm spending most of the early morning writing and/or analyzing for the dissertation, but I'm forcing it and I am growing to resent it more every day. I used to be able to put my head down and write out a 20 page paper from start to finish in a relatively short time. Not so much anymore. I wonder what changed? It's like I can't stand my own voice. I wish there were personal trainers for this, who tell me when I can get up and get lunch and not to surf the web or check e-mail. I would hate that guy, but I'd have the damn thing done! I'm way more interested in my dog, who begs me to play with him all day. Maybe there's some form of hypnotherapy for this. "I am good enough, smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!"

I also haven't been to the gym in forever.

Wish I could get out of this summer funk.

Is it wrong to giggle when you notice that Seasonal Affective Disorder's acronym is SAD?