Recession Liveblog!

Actual lunchtime conversation with a gray-haired co-worker whose name I still don't know:

Him: Good afternoon. Will this explode if I microwave it?
Me: No idea.
Him: It's made of metal.
Me: In that case, maybe you shouldn't microwave it.
[pause]
Him: Did you know that if you microwave pantyh0se, it catches fire? I read that somewhere.
Me: No, I didn't know that.
Him: So if your pantyh0se are wet for some reason, you shouldn't dry them off in the microwave.
Me: Thanks. I'll keep that in mind.


Wine country biking trip I didn't pay for


The afternoon after the final party


The first cold day of the season

I haven't been blogging much--I see I skipped the entire month of February--but oh, how busy I've been! The tragedy (yes, tragedy) of it is that I've been occupied with such truly bloggable material at work. But I've been too busy working, and I can't blog about work as long as I'm still here, anyway. And given the situation (Stable job + nasty recession + 3-strikes-I'm-out on the masters application process), I expect to remain here for a good long while.


Yes, I did fail for the third consecutive year to get into a grad program. Every year that goes by is another mark in favor of selling out. The older I get, the more I would be willing to trade for the ability to afford a certain standard of living. The less I want to be sharing my living space with people I met on Craigslist, perfectly lovely people they may be. The more I long for middle-class comforts like the ability to go on vacation, maybe once a year, on my own dime without bankrupting myself.

But how to sell out? Is anyone even buying these days? This schmancy degree has got to be worth something, hasn't it?

...
...

Or not. Well, I'm employed!


Christmas in Midwest (didn't pay for this either)

The View from My Recession

We found a new flatmate. He's our thirteenth in three years. Or maybe the fourteenth or fifteenth; I can't keep track anymore. He seems to have two girlfriends. They spend alternating nights at our place, and my first thought was that I must be truly awful at recognizing faces. An ex-addict, current law student, barkeep, and apparently manslut, he does seem interesting, maybe a little too interesting, which is why he wasn't our first choice to begin with. But then, our first choices do keep on disappearing on us--

It's that time of year again; time to apply to yet another masters program that I may as well have picked out of a hat; time to beg profs who don't remember me for letters of recommendation; time to make up a coherent narrative in which I travel smoothly from point A through point B all the way to point C when the true story is much more Lynch than Hollywood; time to ask my boss for money; time for all this merriment, and ah, could it be a more wondrous economic clime?

At least I have a job. A full-time job, with so many people underemployed. I really should not be complaining. My own personal recession could be a lot worse.

I'm late to work all the time now, almost every day. But today I biked to the train at sunrise with brain and body in full revolt, and it was kind of nice. Arriving at the station I felt warm and awake in my windbreaker while everyone else yawned and shivered in their coats. Maybe that's what success feels like.

Screw narrative. This isn't narrative. I don't remember narrative. I don't read novels or stories anymore, I just click through blogs, follow links across the Internet, skim the Economist, apply to three radically different programs in three consecutive years; maybe the lack of narrative is narrative enough. I'm just confusing myself with words now and I think I need another tea. I'll be back again sometime.

25

I've been miserable at posting. But I'm a quarter-century old tomorrow, and I've never failed to wish myself a happy birthday on my blog. So hello, let me re-introduce myself.

This is Penitent speaking. I'm just about 25 years old. I'm a shit blogger. What's worse, I've become only shittier with time, but I probably don't have to tell you that.

For my birthday I would like:

(1) A year's supply of provigil
(2) Another vacation with M. (Death Valley in April was sublime and I don't know when I'll be able to do something like that again.)
(3) To get into grad school, ha-ha.
(4) A new job
(5) Someone to pay off my credit-card debt accumulated over almost a year of M. being in graduate school and the both of us being addicted to food and drink
(6) Less partying like I'm 19 on weeknights, waking up late, sitting through the day in hangover-induced idiocy, because the whole routine has worn out its welcome. (Or will the provigil fix this, too?)

It's ninety-fucking-thousand degrees outside. Tomorrow my age will be a perfect square. I ate lunch at 4:30pm today while watching Netflix on my work computer, after having arrived here at 12:30-- I am a horrendous employee and a worse blogger and an even worse-er writer.

Hap-pee birth-day tooo meeeee....

I was going to link to last year's birthday post but I must have deleted it.

Instead, a San Francisco sunrise.


And Werner Herzog.

A Post for Year's End

I'm a terrible blogger.

I was better at it, and enjoyed it more, back when I wrote without thinking about it. Now I think instead of writing; how annoying. Worst of all are these posts after a long absence, in which I feel irrationally obliged to write about everything. I try, run out of time halfway through, and then abandon the post to moulder in blog-limbo for all eternity.

I really ought to be working right now, but I can't make myself do it. I've been wearing other people's contact lenses for at least a year now. I never get enough sleep. The light in my office is dingy and yellow; it flickers or I imagine that it does. I've been late to work every day but one in the past month. I should be writing an English curriculum, but I can hardly form a coherent paragraph. None of these are real excuses for blogging instead of working, but that's all right.

---

Things are good; things are bad.

The bad: Aforementioned sleeplessness. Too much nightlife. Social anxiety disorder, as always. Unable to get my shit together. Money problems. Loser brother. No time to myself. No hobbies or friends. Boyfriend possibly bipolar. Boyfriend's computer died during final exams, so he's monopolizing mine. Choppy fucking sentences. Is this the exhaustion talking?

The good: Job marginally less boring. Good office-mate. The possibility of escaping via grad school. There's an English-language style and usage guide on my desk. Going to Hawaii for the holidays on M.'s mom's dime. M.'s finding some success throwing parties, but this also counts as bad. I'm watching movies again. I even made it to the theater to see No Country for Old Men. Physically healthy and fit. Following the U.S. Presidential race has provided me with constant entertainment.

---

What a discomfiting experience going home has become. My real Thanksgiving bore little similarity to the one I imagined, but I still left San Diego feeling shell-shocked, and I took days just to feel normal again.

I think it used to bother me less because I went down there more often. Things changed more gradually. Now, it's as if everything is changing in snapshots taken a year apart. My mom has twice as many gray hairs as the last time I saw her; my dad's wrinkles are noticeably deeper. My childhood dog, well into her teens, seems exponentially more decrepit with every passing year - and she's been decrepit for a while. Each time I go back, the subdivisions encroaching on my parents' rural enclave have crept a quarter-mile closer.

The old friends who are left down there have changed. The married one bought a condominium with her husband and is talking about having children. Another one has become a fervent evangelical. Kat, the globetrotter whom I expected never to settle down, appears to have settled down in SD and bought a shiny, new downtown apartment. Moreover, after years of flitting noncommittally between men and rejecting relationships in favor of independence, she was thinking about starting a serious relationship. Namely, a serious relationship with my ex-boyfriend, C., whom I dated for five and a half years. I wished her well, and I can't say I was surprised, but I still think the whole situation is more than a little awkward.

Most upsetting, though, was my grandpa, whose mental faculties seem to be deteriorating in a step function. It's not Alzheimer's, and I don't think it's any standard dementia, but Thanksgiving dinner with him was painful. He's been close to deaf for as long as I can remember, but now he has trouble talking as well. My grandma thinks it was a small stroke: he looked frustrated trying to convert thoughts into speech. His sentences trailed off; he rarely formed a complete thought.

He was born in 1920. He's a very old man. Physically he's relatively healthy and active, but I could tell he was thinking about death when he said at the dinner table, "All I want is to see this family back together." He was talking about an old grudge between my grandma and my estranged uncle, Chris. The details are not really important, but they involve money, property, and above all, pride. Chris won't forgive my grandma; she won't forgive him. One result is that my grandpa hasn't seen two of his grandsons since the early nineties. I hear there's another one, a girl, whom none of us has ever seen.

My grandma and dad couldn't have been less understanding. "Why don't you ask Santa Claus? Maybe he can arrange that for you," said my grandma, and my dad snickered. My grandpa looked like he was going to cry. He repeated, "All I want is to see this family back together."

Later, when my dad lay slouched in front of the TV and my mom and grandma putzed about the kitchen, my grandpa moved seats and sat next to me. "I put you in charge," he said. "I can't do it myself. I don't hear so well, so I can't call them on the phone. They moved houses, so I can't drive up and find them. There's nothing I can do." It took him many minutes to get these thoughts out. He whispered, fully aware: "I can't hardly talk no more."

I'm in charge? Shall the social-anxiety poster child succeed as family peacemaker? It's a burden I don't really want, but maybe I'm best suited to it anyhow.

That night, I set to work on Google. There were too many people bearing my uncle's name, and even more with my cousins' names. The search seemed fruitless, so I tried finding the oldest of my uncle's kids on Facebook. Of the ten or so matches to my cousin's name, one was a freshman at my dad's alma mater in LA. It's probably him.

I imagined the message I'd send him - "I think you're my cousin" - and cringed. How should I approach this? "Your grandfather, whom you probably don't remember, wants your dad to make peace with his mother." Or, "Come see grandpa before he goes." Facebook is awkward enough without my using it for such a weighty errand.

I have a calculus final next week. Then, on Friday, I go to Hawaii. I'll think more about this when I get back.

An Interlude for Navel-Gazing and Self-Diagnosis

Here I interrupt the scheduled programming (proceeding apace, as it was) to explain my absence.

True, there's been work. Lots of tedious, tedious work.

It's also true that M. has exercised eminent domain on my laptop for the sacred, o'erweening cause of Making Party Flyers On Photoshop.

But mostly, there's been the crazy.

A few weeks ago, for instance, the left side of my torso was going through spells of numbness. I convinced myself I had either a brain tumor or Huntington's Disease, wondered how I'd react when the doctor gave me the news--wondered how I ought to spend the last few months/years of my life. The numbness is mostly gone now; I believe the correct diagnosis is "crazy."

Not enough? My existing pathologies are getting worse. Social anxiety rules my life, more or less. Increasingly these days, I think of the bewildering array of people I might encounter Out There and decide I'm better off staying home. And away from the phone. Away from the email account. Away from the blog, even.

The social anxiety is clear. Upon reading the DSM-IV criteria for Avoidant Personality Disorder, it's pretty clear I have that, too-- I think I satisfy every criterion. That's not new, though; all that's new is my self-diagnosis. But since I'm already self-diagnosing, I think I'm moderately depressed as well. And this is new.

I kind of hate fun these days. Isn't that what depression is? "Let us go to a mind-bogglingly fun event," says M. "Holy God, I'd rather die," says I. "Let us be friends," writes potentially cool burlesque dancer in an email. "Eh," says I, and ignore it. Old friends write me emails and I've ignored every one. I think my job is hugely responsible for my unhappiness, but inertia keeps me from looking for another. I paid hundreds of dollars for an online class but haven't had the motivation to fax in the first homework assigment, even though I've completed it. For at least six months I've been wearing borrowed contact lenses with mildly incorrect prescriptions because it's too much trouble to make myself an appointment. The list goes on and on.

One frustrating trouble with social anxiety is that it's a huge obstacle to seeking treatment for itself. "It's easy to find a good, affordable therapist," my friend Zoe told me. "Just call around, and negotiate for prices." Negotiate for prices? If I could do such a thing, I wouldn't need the treatment to begin with.

I need a therapist, I probably need drugs, and I certainly need a new job. These are requisite for not feeling like crap, I think.

Then, there's the boyfriend. Dating (and living with) a workaholic statistician has been hard; dating with a workaholic statistician who is also a Ph.D. student may prove even harder. Yet I cannot imagine that either scenario could bring me any closer to madness than the experience of living with that very same workaholic while he's on a six-month rampage of wanton irresponsibility. And what makes it especially pernicious to this melancholic, perenially exhausted social retard has been the dedication with which he pursues his goal of being manically irresponsible. This is not someone who takes partying lightly. Partying is a serious affair, something to monopolize his (and my?) time and money. I daresay I am not built for this, and Depressive Penitent in particular is built for just its opposite. Depressive Penitent wants to sit in a chair with a glass of wine and some Borges stories. She wants to watch hours and hours of Nick Cave videos with big headphones blocking out all the ambient noises. If she must leave her apartment, she'd prefer to make her way to a good friend's place and sip Belgian beer while watching something directed by Kurosawa or Werner Herzog. Hell, she'd be reasonably content studying calculus. But raucous hipster parties populated by tactically bisexual, strategically anorexic fashion girls with enough black or blond hair dye to muddy the whole Pacific? A million times, no! In reality, though, it's been more like: a million times.

I have the pictures to prove it, but uploading them would be too exhausting.

On Friday M. is throwing another party. It should be a big one, but we'll see. This time M. will be a tactical bisexual, and for the night I'll be officially disowned. The bar prefers gay DJs, see. Couples are no fun anyway. He won't be pretending to be bisexual, at any rate: he is bisexual. Or was. Or is. Or was. I don't know, it's so dizzying; if only I got the sense that anything was real. I'm not mad, or I am, or I'm not. Who knows? Not I, certainly.

I do intend to come back and write about my trip east. It was absurd, really, and was responsible either for driving me batshit insane or for helpfully convincing me that I had already gone batshit insane. Either way, interesting!

Don't worry, though, it's all relative. What's insane for me may be a fucking success story for some folk. Besides, I'm drinking lots of German beer as I type and it's making me frightfully dour.

Revoked

I gave up with the “cast of characters” post. I don’t want no cast o’ characters. How lame and “meta” was that? And why was it necessary for me to name everyone after saints? Two words: it wasn’t.

One of the reasons why I haven’t blogged recently is that I’ve been busy at work—and obsessing over politics, a disease if you ask me. But another reason is that I can’t commit to anything these days. A good idea one day seems stupid the next. I want coherence but I can’t seem to provide it. Just as I want to build a life, a formidable self, but persist in being a dilettante, a weaver of plans with no execution.

I want to learn calculus. I want to learn logic. I want to learn formal linguistics. I want to learn computer science. I want to learn biology. I want to read this book, and this one, and this, but alas! The time goes, and I do terribly little beyond my job. I want to leave and I want to stay. I want to be a specialist and I want to be wise in all things.

I don’t want to do the best I can so much as I want to do better than everyone else. There’s a reason why I went to a schmancy-pants college; competitiveness is in my nature. The feeling, not entirely misplaced, that I am being trounced “at life” by my peers is deeply demoralizing.

I can’t even keep a blog. Can I repeat that, for emphasis? I CAN’T EVEN KEEP A BLOG. Even silly fourteen-year-olds can keep blogs. My mind is in disarray. My blog’s title fits, I suppose. Undersecretary of disarray. I wasn’t even “together” enough to be the goddamn Secretary.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, etc.

I would say, "next time, I will write about politics and the elections," but if I did, you would be unwise to believe me.