A Pilgrim’s Digression

Friday afternoon, I saw a therapist for my depression for the first time in about fifteen years. It was a positive experience, primarily because I am now considerably older and more comfortable talking about my past, my feelings, and even my sexual history. What surprised me was that I was comfortable talking about these things with a man; I had previously expressed concern that I would not feel at ease talking to another male.

This therapist is different than the one I saw 15 years ago, however. Whereas my previous therapist was non-responsive, preferring to listen to me talk, my current therapist is quite willing to offer ideas and opinions. We had more of a conversation than a therapy session, and that meant a lot to me. I need to be able to judge a person’s reactions to what I am saying.

That may sound counter-intuitive, but a therapist who is an impassive stone leaves me with the impression that it does not matter what I say because everything I say gets an equally blank reaction.

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Two young men get on an elevator in a government building in Washington, D.C. The first, named Dick, is tall and rather pudgy with blonde hair cut in a flat-top. He walks with a limp. The second fellow, Tom, is shorter, darker, with black hair slicked back on his head and a scraggly moustache under his nose that would be better off shaved. Both men are government employees, but are dressed casually. Dick is wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and a peach polo shirt that drapes rather unflatteringly over his paunchy belly; Tom, who is more in-shape, wears a blue and white striped polo and jeans. Both men look to be in their mid to late twenties.

“So what happened to you and Vanessa?” Tom asks Dick.

“We broke up,” Dick says, grinning.

“What? Why?”

“She asked me to pay her cell phone bill one month.”

“Ah, you don’t need that shit, man,” Tom says.

“Hell no.”

“How long did you two date?”

“About a year, I guess. But I still ain’t paying her phone bill.”

“How high was it?”

“She was behind on it, so it was about three hundred dollars,” Dick says.

“Shit…go in debt for a woman.”

Pause. Then Tom asks, almost in a whisper, “She good in bed?”

“Why does that matter?” Dick asks.

“Well, you know, you could look at it as paying for services…”

Both men laugh.

“She wasn’t worth no three hundred dollars!” Dick says, and they laugh harder.

“Yeah, you’re better off without her,” Tom says, once their laughter has subsided. “Next she’ll have you paying her credit card bills.”

Silence. The elevator is almost at the ground floor. Before we get there, I want to say something. I want to tell the pudge that he probably shouldn’t be so tight with his money, that maybe he ought to be grateful to have found someone to sleep with his sorry ass, but instead I say:

“You know, once you get married you’d be paying her bills anyway. What’s the difference?”

The two of them look at me but don’t say anything for a moment, so that I start to feel like an ass for saying anything at all.

Then Dick says, “Separate bank accounts. Every married couple needs separate bank accounts.”

The elevator door opens and the two men get off. I follow behind, letting them get some distance ahead of me.

Questions: if you had been in a monogamous relationship for a year, would you pay his/her cell phone bill, if asked? Should married or otherwise exclusive, committed couples have separate bank accounts?

Today’s post is kind of a catch-all in which I discuss a number of things that have no real coherency, except as they relate to blogging. March is of course the anniversary month for my blog, and the past days and weeks, I have been taking a look back, fixing some display issues with old blog posts, checking links in my blogroll (and catching up with some folks), and making note of notable posts from the archives that newcomers to my blog might like to read.

I’d like to list those posts here, but first, whatever happened to…

As the Apple Turns

This was a clever and entertaining site for Mac enthusiasts for many years, throughout the late nineties and into the early years of this century. I would consider it a blog, though it came into existence before the era of blogging. Then, suddenly, it stopped being updated.

At the time, I thought perhaps the creator was redesigning the look of it to conform with the new Mac OS X interface. But no, nothing changed. The site stopped being upgraded, frozen forever on October 12, 2005 at 5:03 AM.

Presumably someone is still paying the hosting bill. Where art thou, AtAT? Until I hear from you, I am removing you from my blogroll.

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A two hour recruitment advertisement for the Marine Corps.

I have probably said enough about the film 300 in that one sentence. The reader can then make a judgement about whether my review is favorable or unfavorable, depending on one’s feelings towards the Marines.

I use the Marines comparison because the film depicts an elite corps of warriors, the ancient Spartans, fighting to a glorious death in the battle of Thermopylae. The title, 300, refers to the number of Spartans King Leonidas led against the thousands of Persians who tried to conquer Greece in the fifth century B.C. Its glorification of the all or nothing, black or white, “with us or against us” military mindset will be either a recommendation or a disqualification for some. My own impression is somewhat ambivalent, since I am powerfully attracted to this kind of movie, but wary of the dangers of propaganda.

My first notice of this film occurred last week when a group of students from a local military college, having just seen the film, came into the coffee shop where I was sitting and began raving about it. It occurred to me then that I was going to like this film; it also occurred to me that might be a dangerous thing. It is impossible to watch this film and not draw comparisons between the ancient threat of Persian domination and the modern threat of Muslim terrorists. Already having become satisfied with my conclusion that the current war on terrorism is over-hyped, I did not appreciate a reminder that the stakes may be higher than I am figuring.

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A few weeks ago, Brendan began piano lessons with a college student who teaches piano for extra cash. I am not sure yet that he is going to stick with it; for one thing, he says he does not like it. For another, we don’t have a piano in the home, so with no instrument to practice on he is not going to advance very quickly, if at all.

I’m inclined to let him drop it for now, and maybe take up another instrument when he is a little older. We have a violin that belonged to my maternal great grandfather. I’d like Brendan to learn how to play that, eventually.

But for now, we have been experimenting with piano lessons. Last Monday, I took him for his second lesson, after school.

His piano teacher’s name is Martha, and she is a college student, approximately twenty-two or three years old. Her apartment is not your typical college pad, however, probably because the college she attends is very expensive: $35,000.00 a year. Her apartment is bright and roomy, so new-looking you can almost smell the fresh paint and brand new carpet. In the living room, an enormous picture window looks out over the river and allows plenty of light into the room. While waiting for Brendan to finish his lesson, I sit on her leather sectional sofa and look at the large, blank, flat HDTV.

The TV sits on a modern-looking, IKEA entertainment table where her Sony home theatre and X-Box 360 also sit in perfect, small little cubbies. The controllers are neatly placed on top of the X-Box, the front of each one facing the other, their cords carefully concealed behind the machine.  Another cubby holds six or seven DVD movies nad Xbox games.  I cannot read the titles of the games from where I sit, but I can read the DVD titles: “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Troy,” “Meet the Fockers”…all fairly typical, light film fodder.  I was hoping to see something like Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, a film that might give an indication of a wild and rich intellectual life.

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The following quote is from an article on Barak Obama in the Washington Post. Eugene Robinson was writing of Obama’s rejection of the “either-or” mentality of Washington, which defines every problem as being either about too little money, or too little personal responsibility.

While more resources are needed [to battle inner-city educational problems], “there is a strong values-and-character component to educational achievement,” Obama said. “To deny that is to deny reality, and I don’t want to cede that reality to conservatives who use it as an excuse to underfund the schools. . . . Sometimes people think that when we talk about values, that somehow that’s making a ‘lift yourself up by your own bootstraps’ argument and letting the larger society off the hook. That’s why I always emphasize that we need both individual responsibility and mutual responsibility.”

I think there is a strong craving in society for a message such as this, and maybe for a messenger who can deliver it. People are sick of the “liberals/conservatives are evil” war, instigated and promoted by the media. What people are anxious to see is someone who is genuinely what George Bush merely promoted himself as being: “a uniter, not a divider.”

One of the reasons I do not support Hillary is that she is not that kind of politician. She represents the forces of stasis and division in government. Turning over the Presidency to yet another Clinton (following eight years of another Bush) would merely prolong the tug of war that has existed between the left and right for far too long–for pretty much the entirety of my life, in fact.

We need a better way to advance, instead of merely swinging back and forth between a leftist and a rightist dictatorship of the petty powerful. Our government and our country are not going to progress if we keep electing the same people, or the same kind of people rather, over and over.

In the interest of changing the subject from my personal problems, I want to express a few random opinions about the 2008 Presidential race, which seemed to have begun sometime around December 2004. Politics has been the least of the many things weighing on my mind, of late, and I haven’t the energy or the time to source the kind of lengthy political op-eds I used to write. But I have been listening to the Newshour podcasts (mainly for Brooks and Shields), and I have been listening to the Washington Week podcast, and I have been listening to various NPR podcasts, as well.

Funny how all the political podcasts I listen to seem to be public television or radio-produced. I used to listen to the Powerline Blog podcast, but I listen to enough conservative talk radio in the car while driving. I don’t need more of that on my iPod.

The 2008 candidates seem to be lining up more or less as expected: McCain, Giuliani, and Romney for the Republicans, and Clinton, Obama, Edwards for the Democrats. There are others who may or may not close the gap between themselves and the leaders, but in general, the six candidates listed above have a shot at their party’s nomination. The others, such as Joe Biden, do not.

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I have scheduled an appointment with a therapist for March 23; I am still calling doctors, however, trying to get an earlier appointment. In the end, I could not get a female therapist, either. When the choice is almost non-existent, beggars can’t be picky.

At the moment, I do not feel particularly miserable, but one thing I have learned about myself over the years is that I am liable to slide back into the pit without much warning. Sometimes there are precipitating events–innocuous events, quite often, such as a trip to Lowe’s–but just as often, there is no discernible reason for the onset of depression.

On any particularly ordinary afternoon, the sky can unexpectedly cloud over. And even when feeling the warm sun on my face, standing just behind me is the shadow.

I feel good, but there is a part of me that knows I am not well and worries over my state of being, the way one will compulsively wiggle and poke at a sore tooth with the tongue, until a minor soreness blossoms into nerve-tender pain. For me, the part I obsess over is my loss of interest in things that used to bring me enjoyment: reading, writing, and thinking about intellectual matters, from politics to literature.

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We travelled to Pittsburgh this weekend to visit family, and I took this picture with my cell phone at a convenience store in West Virginia. I think the picture says all that needs to be said.

This post is just an fyi: I am upgrading my blogging software from WordPress 2.0 to 2.1. I am hoping it won’t break my theme, but if you notice any funkiness about my site, it’s probably because the upgrade went terribly wrong.

WordPress 2.1 has some great new features, and I am looking forward to getting some blogging done with it. It has a Post Autosave feature, which will come in very handy for me. I’ve lost many, many posts due to accidental navigation away from the page and browser crashes.

2.1 also has a tabbed editor for easy switching between the WYSIWYG editor and the code editor. Hopefully, I won’t have to spend as much time in the code as in the past, though. 2.1 supposedly fixes many of the HTML bugs that forced me to visit the code editor after publishing a post and seeing how it was displaying.

I also rather like this feature, though I am not sure yet whether I will use it:

“New search engine privacy option allows you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.”

I’ve become more aware of my own privacy needs lately, due to this blog being associated with my real-life name. The names of people from my past that I’d prefer never to hear from again were turning up in my email inbox. As a result, I’ve had to lower my profile by removing any mention of my real name from the site, and I’ve changed the names of real people I have mentioned in blog posts.

I know it’s naive, but I write this blog thinking I am speaking to a select group of friends, but in fact I have more visitors than I know about, many of whom I’d rather not hear from.

Upgrade Update: the upgrade went fairly smoothly, except for a database error I am getting in my sidebar.  I suspect the problem is with some customization of the code in my theme.  I seem to remember tinkering with the code to display my Blogroll links in a different order than was customary.  But it’s been a couple years now.  I’ll figure it out eventually.

By the way, i really like the new features.  I am still not sure whether I will go “private” or not, though.  Despite the risks, it seems antithetical to the purpose of a blog to make it inaccessible to Google and other search engines.  Any opinions on the subject from my readers?