I've gone back and culled some of my greatest hits. It was odd, though. Going back and seeing all of the posts that I wrote for this blog - it was a tech/internet blog - immediately made me swallow back some vomit.
But the pictures, they were fun.
Monday, May 6, 2013
What a bad Filter song that was
I got to thinking earlier about some of the goofy photoshop abominations I'd create when I wrote for this blog a while back. The writing was middling at best, but making some of these dumb pictures to run with my articles was easily my favorite part of the job. I wouldn't be surprised if the amount of time I wasted making those images was one of the reasons I eventually ended up the butcher's block. Oh well. My posts were at least the most eye-catching.
I've gone back and culled some of my greatest hits. It was odd, though. Going back and seeing all of the posts that I wrote for this blog - it was a tech/internet blog - immediately made me swallow back some vomit.
But the pictures, they were fun.
I've gone back and culled some of my greatest hits. It was odd, though. Going back and seeing all of the posts that I wrote for this blog - it was a tech/internet blog - immediately made me swallow back some vomit.
But the pictures, they were fun.
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Tolstoy's Undergarments
I suck at languages.
More specifically, I suck at learning new languages. Maybe I'm stuck in what I've always heard spoken as truth, that it's much harder to learn a second (or third, or whatever) language when you're older. I can only speculate that there is some truth to that, as I seem to never have any trouble recalling the first ten numbers in Spanish, which I learned in kindergarten. But the Spanish I learned in college? Eh, that's less reliable.
For all I know, maybe it's a greater difficulty with memory and age. I certainly can fairly easily rattle off some old nursery rhymes I read or a lullaby my mother would sing me from my early childhood, but I have more difficulty reciting Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" monologue - and I've seen the latter more times and more recently. It's hard to make sense of any of that, especially considering that I've spent lots of focused time on remembering what Hamlet says.
The problem might be less general and more specific to my own memory, and how my brain keeps shoddy storage of memory. I don't know.
The lack of deftness when it comes to learning non-English languages is not just vexing for the practical reason (that being to talk to people in that language). It's more bothersome to me as a reader, and what that limits to me in terms of literature. I like reading. It's less an activity for me at this point and more a way of life. I cannot imagine a meaningful life without reading. There are times in my life where I am positive that my capability to escape inside of a book has saved me from hurting or killing myself.
Aside from the buoy that reading has provided me in my life, I also do it because I like learning. I like changing, and I like being more aware of the world, whether it's fictional or real (or as objectively real as a book can present this reality). Being only proficient in one language, I'm immediately disadvantaged in terms of what material I can read in this world. Sure, there are translations, but I have difficulty in trusting the translator's authenticity to the original text.
When talking about the translations of various books from the 19th century Russian literary canon, Nabokov said that the only way to truly grasp the majesty of something like War & Peace was to read it in Russian.
Uh. No shit. Not all of us have the luxury of being natural polyglots. But thanks.
That he said that about 19th century Russian texts is more personal to me, though, because as an epoch of literature, it is my favorite literary enclave. Well, I suppose it is my favorite - I enjoy all that I've read, but how can I be so sure that what I'm reading is truly how Dostoyevsky, for example, intended to convey his story? I don't. So I have to rely on the translator's caprice.
As prickly as he may be on the subject, I do wish that Nabokov were still alive to assess the quality of the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations. Apparently the duo have recently wrapped up translating all of Tolstoy's major works, which was cause for me to revisit why I don't like their translations. Their two-step process of making a literal translation, and then brushing that up with a more ornate eloquence is suspect to me.
Translation methodology aside, the Pevear and Volokohnsky translations have always bothered me for a less linguistic reason. While most of the criticism of their translations has been directed at their alleged failure to preserve the authorial voice of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, or even have neglected to retain the dark wit of the authors, my concern with their translations has always been about the preservation of cultural markers within the texts.
I was first alarmed of this when I was reading Anna Karenina for a Russian Lit class in college. I unintentionally read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, while the rest of my class read the Constance Garnett translation. There was a passage I remember being discussed, something going on with Anna and her children in St. Petersburg. My classmates were going back and forth about a part of the text. Someone happened to mention the detail of that Anna's children were eating pudding while something more important was going on. The mention of them eating pudding was only relevant in the classroom discussion because it was a marker for which part of the book we were talking about, like "But when they were eating the pudding, Anna was doing xyz..." That was it.
Everybody seemed to be on the same page, so to speak, except for me. I couldn't find where in the book the event was happening while the kids gobbled up their pudding. Then it occurred to me: my text didn't say "pudding." It said "cake."
This has always bothered me about the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations, because it seems like a strange license to take with their translation, and one that may be disingenuous to the culture of 19th century Russian aristocracy. Who knows, maybe "cake" is the more accurate translation of Tolsty's original text. But in a class of people where several of the students were reading or had read Anna Karenina in Russian, I would expect that at least my instructor would have pointed out that it was indeed cake they children were eating, and not pudding.
Although I'm hung up on the very real difference between cake and pudding here, in the greater scope of Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation, such a detail might be trivia. Yet, it still feels worrisome to me in that it's altering the societal or class habits of certain people - details that are important for accurately constructing what life was like for certain types of people (such as rich kids in Saint Petersburg, for example). Let's suppose I write a book, and in my book someone is eating a hamburger. My book gets translated into Russian, and then the translator comes to my hamburger-eating passage and decides to translate "hamburger" as "hot dog." Not a terrible different, really, but my decision to say "hamburger" may very well have had intentional purposes meant to comport certain between-the-line details about my character. Hot dogs are associated with specific things in America, and they're not always evenly interchangeable with hamburgers. Hot dogs are cheaper, often eaten at specific places (ball parks, carnivals) or at certain times of year (like summer, when people are more likely to grill out).
It might not even be so embedded with meaning. Maybe that's simply how I saw the character: a hamburger man, not a hot dog man.
At best, the decision of Pevear and Volokhonsky to use "cake" instead of "pudding" may have been a topical error. At worst, though, I worry that the decision was more deliberate, possibly in an attempt to make the setting something that it wasn't. To the middle and upper middle classes of America, cake is thought of as more opulent than pudding. I mean, that's why we have such a gastro-fetish with all these reality shows about ultra-ornate cakes and bakers, and not so many shows on "America's Pudding Boss."
With this in mind, I worry that Pevear and Volokhonsky may have intentionally swapped certain words in order to make the text more Americanized. Doing so would make it easier for American readers to appreciate the wealth of Anna's family, but it fails to preserve the cultural difference between what it is to be rich in America and what it is to be rich in Russia (in the 19th century, no less).
It's ironic, too, that some of the criticism of the Garnett translations is that her translation not only makes every Russian author sound the same, but that they sound Edwardian. That's probably a fair criticism, but at the same time, it's odd that I haven't seen similar critiques of the culture represented in the Pevear/Volokhonsky translations.
The thing is, though, is I have no idea what's more accurate. Short of taking up the onus of studying the habits of 19th century Russian and become fluent in Russian - with a focus on the verbage of that specific era - I'm left to the whims of those who have the resources to translate things like Anna Karenina. It's frustrating to read discussion forums of people debating the quality of the translation, but only after adding the caveat that they don't speak Russian. Useless.
As much as I want to blame Oprah, I don't think it's her fault. However, she did call Anna Karenina the "harlequin romance of their time." So maybe it is her fault.
I wish I could resolve this problem on my own. I wish I could become fluent enough in Russian that I could read something like Anna Karenina in its native tongue, and then simply make my own conclusions. Really, I don't want to read Pevear/Volokhonsky, and I don't want to read Garnet. I want to read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Gogol, and not be troubled with the potential inaccuracies of their scripts as retold by an intermediary.
But I suck at languages, and short of undergoing a lengthy language immersion program in Moscow, I'm likely just going to be at the mercy of translators.
Accepting that this is simply how it's going to be makes me uncomfortable because I become very uncomfortable by any situation that makes me feel helpless. And the limit and inaccessibility to other languages makes me very helpless.
More specifically, I suck at learning new languages. Maybe I'm stuck in what I've always heard spoken as truth, that it's much harder to learn a second (or third, or whatever) language when you're older. I can only speculate that there is some truth to that, as I seem to never have any trouble recalling the first ten numbers in Spanish, which I learned in kindergarten. But the Spanish I learned in college? Eh, that's less reliable.
For all I know, maybe it's a greater difficulty with memory and age. I certainly can fairly easily rattle off some old nursery rhymes I read or a lullaby my mother would sing me from my early childhood, but I have more difficulty reciting Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" monologue - and I've seen the latter more times and more recently. It's hard to make sense of any of that, especially considering that I've spent lots of focused time on remembering what Hamlet says.
The problem might be less general and more specific to my own memory, and how my brain keeps shoddy storage of memory. I don't know.
The lack of deftness when it comes to learning non-English languages is not just vexing for the practical reason (that being to talk to people in that language). It's more bothersome to me as a reader, and what that limits to me in terms of literature. I like reading. It's less an activity for me at this point and more a way of life. I cannot imagine a meaningful life without reading. There are times in my life where I am positive that my capability to escape inside of a book has saved me from hurting or killing myself.
Aside from the buoy that reading has provided me in my life, I also do it because I like learning. I like changing, and I like being more aware of the world, whether it's fictional or real (or as objectively real as a book can present this reality). Being only proficient in one language, I'm immediately disadvantaged in terms of what material I can read in this world. Sure, there are translations, but I have difficulty in trusting the translator's authenticity to the original text.
When talking about the translations of various books from the 19th century Russian literary canon, Nabokov said that the only way to truly grasp the majesty of something like War & Peace was to read it in Russian.
Uh. No shit. Not all of us have the luxury of being natural polyglots. But thanks.
That he said that about 19th century Russian texts is more personal to me, though, because as an epoch of literature, it is my favorite literary enclave. Well, I suppose it is my favorite - I enjoy all that I've read, but how can I be so sure that what I'm reading is truly how Dostoyevsky, for example, intended to convey his story? I don't. So I have to rely on the translator's caprice.
As prickly as he may be on the subject, I do wish that Nabokov were still alive to assess the quality of the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations. Apparently the duo have recently wrapped up translating all of Tolstoy's major works, which was cause for me to revisit why I don't like their translations. Their two-step process of making a literal translation, and then brushing that up with a more ornate eloquence is suspect to me.
Translation methodology aside, the Pevear and Volokohnsky translations have always bothered me for a less linguistic reason. While most of the criticism of their translations has been directed at their alleged failure to preserve the authorial voice of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, or even have neglected to retain the dark wit of the authors, my concern with their translations has always been about the preservation of cultural markers within the texts.
I was first alarmed of this when I was reading Anna Karenina for a Russian Lit class in college. I unintentionally read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, while the rest of my class read the Constance Garnett translation. There was a passage I remember being discussed, something going on with Anna and her children in St. Petersburg. My classmates were going back and forth about a part of the text. Someone happened to mention the detail of that Anna's children were eating pudding while something more important was going on. The mention of them eating pudding was only relevant in the classroom discussion because it was a marker for which part of the book we were talking about, like "But when they were eating the pudding, Anna was doing xyz..." That was it.
Everybody seemed to be on the same page, so to speak, except for me. I couldn't find where in the book the event was happening while the kids gobbled up their pudding. Then it occurred to me: my text didn't say "pudding." It said "cake."
This has always bothered me about the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations, because it seems like a strange license to take with their translation, and one that may be disingenuous to the culture of 19th century Russian aristocracy. Who knows, maybe "cake" is the more accurate translation of Tolsty's original text. But in a class of people where several of the students were reading or had read Anna Karenina in Russian, I would expect that at least my instructor would have pointed out that it was indeed cake they children were eating, and not pudding.
Although I'm hung up on the very real difference between cake and pudding here, in the greater scope of Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation, such a detail might be trivia. Yet, it still feels worrisome to me in that it's altering the societal or class habits of certain people - details that are important for accurately constructing what life was like for certain types of people (such as rich kids in Saint Petersburg, for example). Let's suppose I write a book, and in my book someone is eating a hamburger. My book gets translated into Russian, and then the translator comes to my hamburger-eating passage and decides to translate "hamburger" as "hot dog." Not a terrible different, really, but my decision to say "hamburger" may very well have had intentional purposes meant to comport certain between-the-line details about my character. Hot dogs are associated with specific things in America, and they're not always evenly interchangeable with hamburgers. Hot dogs are cheaper, often eaten at specific places (ball parks, carnivals) or at certain times of year (like summer, when people are more likely to grill out).
It might not even be so embedded with meaning. Maybe that's simply how I saw the character: a hamburger man, not a hot dog man.
At best, the decision of Pevear and Volokhonsky to use "cake" instead of "pudding" may have been a topical error. At worst, though, I worry that the decision was more deliberate, possibly in an attempt to make the setting something that it wasn't. To the middle and upper middle classes of America, cake is thought of as more opulent than pudding. I mean, that's why we have such a gastro-fetish with all these reality shows about ultra-ornate cakes and bakers, and not so many shows on "America's Pudding Boss."
With this in mind, I worry that Pevear and Volokhonsky may have intentionally swapped certain words in order to make the text more Americanized. Doing so would make it easier for American readers to appreciate the wealth of Anna's family, but it fails to preserve the cultural difference between what it is to be rich in America and what it is to be rich in Russia (in the 19th century, no less).
It's ironic, too, that some of the criticism of the Garnett translations is that her translation not only makes every Russian author sound the same, but that they sound Edwardian. That's probably a fair criticism, but at the same time, it's odd that I haven't seen similar critiques of the culture represented in the Pevear/Volokhonsky translations.
The thing is, though, is I have no idea what's more accurate. Short of taking up the onus of studying the habits of 19th century Russian and become fluent in Russian - with a focus on the verbage of that specific era - I'm left to the whims of those who have the resources to translate things like Anna Karenina. It's frustrating to read discussion forums of people debating the quality of the translation, but only after adding the caveat that they don't speak Russian. Useless.
As much as I want to blame Oprah, I don't think it's her fault. However, she did call Anna Karenina the "harlequin romance of their time." So maybe it is her fault.
I wish I could resolve this problem on my own. I wish I could become fluent enough in Russian that I could read something like Anna Karenina in its native tongue, and then simply make my own conclusions. Really, I don't want to read Pevear/Volokhonsky, and I don't want to read Garnet. I want to read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Gogol, and not be troubled with the potential inaccuracies of their scripts as retold by an intermediary.
But I suck at languages, and short of undergoing a lengthy language immersion program in Moscow, I'm likely just going to be at the mercy of translators.
Accepting that this is simply how it's going to be makes me uncomfortable because I become very uncomfortable by any situation that makes me feel helpless. And the limit and inaccessibility to other languages makes me very helpless.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Financial Times, late edition
I've spent the better part of the afternoon working on a budget. While I have most of the amenities in order to pass as someone who appears to be making ends meet, it's hardly that simple. I'm terrible with money. Rather, when I had a reasonable income, I was terrible with money. Now, I just don't have any. I hardly make any, relatively speaking. Chalk it up to lack of discipline or forgetfulness or malice or capitalism or whatever - in the end, the result is still going to be the same, and I'm still going to be broke. Combined - the lack of reliable income and my persistent habit to "waste" money - I'm essentially stuck in the shit. Always.
In previous periods of my life, I'd most likely say my undisciplined spending ways were why I was always living paycheck to paycheck. Fun came first; at least, it came ahead of financial planning.
Christ, that phrase. "Financial planning." As two words, they're fine, but it's that phrase that conceals an institutional construct that exists to index people's failure or success as, well, people based on how well they plan their finances. By this regard, I suck at being somebody. My credit score is so low it can be found stuck to the bottom of Satan's spittoon. I barely scrape by (I always run out of money at the end of the month). I have a whopping $0.05 in my savings account. Even plotting out my expenses per month against my monthly income is a ghastly contrast to how mired in semi-poverty I currently am.
The whole idea for comparing income and costs, and for making the budget in the first place, is because I'm going to begin saving money toward a pricey purchase this year. It's not even for any tangible product that would make me a better owner and, therefore, a better American. It's simply to go on a trip, to reunite with my love, and do and see some things I'd like to do and see.
Based on my cost of living, however meager, and how much I'll need to save before September, I'd essentially have to be surviving on a Gulag diet. I'd probably have to reel back and rely on Gulag-quality sources of entertainment, too, for what it's worth.
But if that's going to be the quality of my life for the next four months (sometimes that sounds like forever, sometimes it seems like no time at all), what toll will those living conditions take on my mental health, which is already sensitive and prone to life-ending depression? Again with the cost-benefit analysis.
To undertake this kind of budget and actually have it work, I now will have to actively cope with my depression and keep myself from sinking too far down that hole. I've never demonstrated the will power required for that, but I suppose there's no time like the present to try and muster it. Additionally, the incentive of my trip may prove to be a potent motivator to summon the will power required to maintain a moderately healthy affect.
Knowing this and enacting on this are hardly the same, though. They're not comparable. Knowing earth has a moon doesn't necessarily mean that I'll go visit it one day if I really want to. The consideration and coping applied to my mental health during this time will likely be the more difficult item in my life to budget. So I guess there's that.
I'm tired, though, of the financial dilemmas. And while I don't desire to have some kind economic comfort that would buttress a care-free spending spree throughout my life, it would be nice to have a little more flexibility when it comes to the options I'd like to have. It's maddening that I may not have enough money to go to Peru simply because I neglected once or twice to buy the store-brand meat that was on sale (and it was only on sale because it would be rancid in another day or two).
Sitting down today to plot out a budget for the next four months also produced a troubling realization: making a budget is only possible if you have enough money to redistribute and, in some cases, save. "Budgeting," in my case, is a careful allocation of what little income I have just so I don't starve. There is little room for rearranging my money, and even less for saving. I also can't "cut out" things from my spending. I spend my money on rent and food, and on the occasional bit of alcohol - the latter expense I justify as necessary to help me sometimes escape the misery over how broke I am. I can only roll back the amounts I'm already spending on those items. Since I predict - and reliably at that - my landlord won't be so agreeable to me spending less on my rent per month, that leaves food and entertainment on the chopping block. That's it. Goddamn dreary.
I do realize that, above all of this, I do have the option of picking up a second job in order to add to my income, even if it is a job that I plan to drop in September like a burner mob phone. And I probably will do that, but still. That doesn't make it any less frustrating. I'm always aware that my situation could be much, much worse.
I have no problem making sacrifices, or even forgoing one thing in order to work towards a more desired goal. I just wish the options weren't so goddamn extreme.
~
Walking home today, I saw a dead squirrel in the middle of the road, presumably killed by a passing car. It's brains had spurted out of the top of its head, near its ear.
A block further down, I saw some starch-collared religious youths going door to door. I crossed the street and kept my head down to avoid them, but I did manage to hear how they knocked upon the door of the house across the street. The boy knocked the way a pediatrician would knock on the patient's door before entering the room in order to administer a child's first suppository.
Somehow, both of these are held as proof of god's work.
In previous periods of my life, I'd most likely say my undisciplined spending ways were why I was always living paycheck to paycheck. Fun came first; at least, it came ahead of financial planning.
Christ, that phrase. "Financial planning." As two words, they're fine, but it's that phrase that conceals an institutional construct that exists to index people's failure or success as, well, people based on how well they plan their finances. By this regard, I suck at being somebody. My credit score is so low it can be found stuck to the bottom of Satan's spittoon. I barely scrape by (I always run out of money at the end of the month). I have a whopping $0.05 in my savings account. Even plotting out my expenses per month against my monthly income is a ghastly contrast to how mired in semi-poverty I currently am.
The whole idea for comparing income and costs, and for making the budget in the first place, is because I'm going to begin saving money toward a pricey purchase this year. It's not even for any tangible product that would make me a better owner and, therefore, a better American. It's simply to go on a trip, to reunite with my love, and do and see some things I'd like to do and see.
Based on my cost of living, however meager, and how much I'll need to save before September, I'd essentially have to be surviving on a Gulag diet. I'd probably have to reel back and rely on Gulag-quality sources of entertainment, too, for what it's worth.
But if that's going to be the quality of my life for the next four months (sometimes that sounds like forever, sometimes it seems like no time at all), what toll will those living conditions take on my mental health, which is already sensitive and prone to life-ending depression? Again with the cost-benefit analysis.
To undertake this kind of budget and actually have it work, I now will have to actively cope with my depression and keep myself from sinking too far down that hole. I've never demonstrated the will power required for that, but I suppose there's no time like the present to try and muster it. Additionally, the incentive of my trip may prove to be a potent motivator to summon the will power required to maintain a moderately healthy affect.
Knowing this and enacting on this are hardly the same, though. They're not comparable. Knowing earth has a moon doesn't necessarily mean that I'll go visit it one day if I really want to. The consideration and coping applied to my mental health during this time will likely be the more difficult item in my life to budget. So I guess there's that.
I'm tired, though, of the financial dilemmas. And while I don't desire to have some kind economic comfort that would buttress a care-free spending spree throughout my life, it would be nice to have a little more flexibility when it comes to the options I'd like to have. It's maddening that I may not have enough money to go to Peru simply because I neglected once or twice to buy the store-brand meat that was on sale (and it was only on sale because it would be rancid in another day or two).
Sitting down today to plot out a budget for the next four months also produced a troubling realization: making a budget is only possible if you have enough money to redistribute and, in some cases, save. "Budgeting," in my case, is a careful allocation of what little income I have just so I don't starve. There is little room for rearranging my money, and even less for saving. I also can't "cut out" things from my spending. I spend my money on rent and food, and on the occasional bit of alcohol - the latter expense I justify as necessary to help me sometimes escape the misery over how broke I am. I can only roll back the amounts I'm already spending on those items. Since I predict - and reliably at that - my landlord won't be so agreeable to me spending less on my rent per month, that leaves food and entertainment on the chopping block. That's it. Goddamn dreary.
I do realize that, above all of this, I do have the option of picking up a second job in order to add to my income, even if it is a job that I plan to drop in September like a burner mob phone. And I probably will do that, but still. That doesn't make it any less frustrating. I'm always aware that my situation could be much, much worse.
I have no problem making sacrifices, or even forgoing one thing in order to work towards a more desired goal. I just wish the options weren't so goddamn extreme.
~
Walking home today, I saw a dead squirrel in the middle of the road, presumably killed by a passing car. It's brains had spurted out of the top of its head, near its ear.
A block further down, I saw some starch-collared religious youths going door to door. I crossed the street and kept my head down to avoid them, but I did manage to hear how they knocked upon the door of the house across the street. The boy knocked the way a pediatrician would knock on the patient's door before entering the room in order to administer a child's first suppository.
Somehow, both of these are held as proof of god's work.
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Full-on Anxiety, This Time
Anxiety is not drowning. Anxiety is not burning alive. By whatever deliverance, those fatal miseries end. They end because you're saved or you're not and you die. Either way, you don't have to go on too long with the panic. Your suffering in the moment, for better or worse, ends.
Anxiety is not that benevolent.
Anxiety is drowning even though you can reach the surface. Anxiety is burning even though there is no fire. Anxiety is having to suffer through those experiences in your head without the experience itself. Worse, you know you will survive it. You'll survive because madness will make sure of it.
Anxiety is not depression. Anxiety is parasitic. It will take over the host and dictate actions in the zombified body that used to be yours.
Anxiety does not usher you into the rightful deliverance of death. Instead it makes you immortal while thriving like a tapeworm, consuming you from the inside and leaving only enough of yourself behind to ensure you don't die. A studied parasite. You don't die unless you choose to push through that door but if it's only anxiety, you won't. It's better to just suffer on this side of the doorway.
That's what the parasite wants, at least.
When you don't die from it – and you won't – anxiety goes on eating through you, subsisting on your joy and your excitement and your fear. Only anxiety isn't a parasitic worm harvesting whatever you dump into your guts. Anxiety has become you, the you turned against yourself and every chance you have of action.
Anxiety is yourself as the long shadow cast forth in your shape under a late sun: stretched out upon the torture rack of the sidewalk, stretched beyond your body's natural shape; emaciated and dark, unrecognizable to yourself even though it is your self.
Anxiety is the ellipsis interjected inside of your sentence, guiding the eyes toward an unfinished thought and never finishing the statement with anything else but the panic of having to go on. And you will go on.
Anxiety is going to war and dreading that you will come back. It becomes your personal moment in Normandy, in your Fallujah, in your Mogadishu. You worry less about not coming back and more how you could ever come back.
If sorrow was Kierkegaard's castle, then anxiety is the rotted bridge that you can never finish crossing. The moat yawns below you with each step.
Anxiety isn't sorrow and it isn't depression. Anxiety wants to keep you alive, to keep the misery going. It accelerates your mind, races you toward a future that you don't want where you are decaying and dreadful but still alive. Depression would just as soon see you dead.
Anxiety is dreading the life to come after survival or, better, fear of survival; of living marked, cursed, never the same again. Anxiety is wearing the cage of rats around your head in Room 101, torturing you to the point that you desperately scream, “Do it to Julia! Not me!” except there is no Julia and there are no rats. There's no one to sacrifice for your peace of mind, no one to relinquish the fear-torture. You are your own Room 101 and after the torture, you can only stare a stare into something in a mirror that looks back and says without words meant to be forgiving or understanding, “I betrayed you.”
~
I remember the first time I felt it. I was in the 4th grade and called one of my friends an asshole under my breath. They didn't hear me but that didn't matter. I'd said a bad word and bad behavior like that was a punched ticket to Hell. The panic of having sinned, having trespassed against another human, of having done something that would curse my life from here on out was relentless. I worried all night about it. I prayed about it—back when I still felt that prayer could affect the human condition—and hoped salvation could be within reach later in life.
I was in fourth grade and already felt my life was over. Because of a word. Because of anxiety.
Excepting its occasional dormancy, anxiety has been cycling through me like that ever since. Expecting my life as I know it is over. Expecting the very worst possible ending.
~
Anxiety isn't always the fear of not being noticed. Sometimes it's the fear of being noticed because it confirms that you are not, in fact, invisible. All it takes is one person to remind you that you exist and that existence is plagued by anxiety. When other people notice you, you feel you must perform your best for these other people. It's the fear of having to perform and impress and pressured to do something that you know will fail. Beyond rejection, anxiety warms the face every time you have to perform because you know everybody will recognize in your crestfallen expression the moment you realize you have failed.
You can't help but betray yourself.
~
Anxiety is spending a lifetime dying even though death has forgotten you. Again, anxiety makes you immortal but without giving you any divine gift for survival other than waking up to another day to find anxiety waiting for you under your pillow like some demented tooth fairy's prize.
Anxiety makes a miracle of science out of you. In my own experience, I have been terminally diagnosed with everything that makes you dead and miserable and tainted yet I have survived seemingly unscathed except for the desperation anxiety leaves in its wake. I couldn't begin to tell you how many times I have been desperate: I have beaten cancer, I have overcome AIDS; chlamydia, toxoplasmosis, schizophrenia. I have survived blood parasites. I have survived them all.*
I have beat them all because they have all – and always – been in my head.
And all of them were only ever there because of my anxiety.
The irony that anxiety thrives on is that, my mental illnesses aside, I am a healthy adult male. I have never had so much as an allergic reaction in my life. Through risky decisions and stupid decisions, ranging from eating a raw egg to having unprotected sex, I am still somehow healthy (with the medical charts to prove it).
In spite of that gold medal track record, anxiety convincingly told me I was never going to be the same after any of it. Anxiety put the diseases in me and made me live through them long enough to survive them until good sense and medication kicked in. And then it was on to the next terminal condition.
I didn't get a physician's examination after every occasion because I didn't want the confirmation that my life was over (nor do I want to spend every waking moment of my life in a doctor's waiting lobby). Somehow, I illogically thought that I'd live longer if I didn't know I was dying. Through this terrible judgment, anxiety preserved me and I eventually no longer had the illness I feared I had. Anxiety is never wanting to know because knowing is the death knell, the toll for whom everybody mourns by you.
The very worst part is trying to distinguish between the voices of anxiety and good sense. They sound so similar in my head yet I have to find a way to discern between panicked response and educated response. I might have been right so far about what I suspected illnesses I've been examined for, but I don't go for every one of them. In this sense, anxiety may very well be killing me because it is increasingly difficult to determine what is legitimate and what is simply a product of my own corrupt mind.
That is anxiety. If you haven't survived it, you don't know it. It makes you desperate and bends you over backwards, forcing you to see the world in a way it really isn't. If you haven't felt the whisper of fear from depression's closest companion, you haven't known anxiety. Anxiety is not depression and it's not death, but it does enjoy masquerading as death's false harbinger.
*Thanks to anxiety, the author has also miraculously survived: HIV, brain cancer, syphilis, gum cancer, the clap, appendicitis, rabies, stomach cancer, herpes, multiple aneurisms, blood clots in the lungs, lung cancer, IBS, breast cancer, melanoma, MRSA, tuberculosis, histoplasmosis, kidney failure, testicular cancer, cirrhosis, anal cancer, multiple strokes, cardiomyopathy, several heart attacks, thyroid cancer, asphyxiation, some weird thing when he was eleven years old and couldn't get the smell of match sulfur out of his nose, lymphoma, throat cancer, and tonsillitis to name a few.
Anxiety is not that benevolent.
Anxiety is drowning even though you can reach the surface. Anxiety is burning even though there is no fire. Anxiety is having to suffer through those experiences in your head without the experience itself. Worse, you know you will survive it. You'll survive because madness will make sure of it.
Anxiety is not depression. Anxiety is parasitic. It will take over the host and dictate actions in the zombified body that used to be yours.
Anxiety does not usher you into the rightful deliverance of death. Instead it makes you immortal while thriving like a tapeworm, consuming you from the inside and leaving only enough of yourself behind to ensure you don't die. A studied parasite. You don't die unless you choose to push through that door but if it's only anxiety, you won't. It's better to just suffer on this side of the doorway.
That's what the parasite wants, at least.
When you don't die from it – and you won't – anxiety goes on eating through you, subsisting on your joy and your excitement and your fear. Only anxiety isn't a parasitic worm harvesting whatever you dump into your guts. Anxiety has become you, the you turned against yourself and every chance you have of action.
Anxiety is yourself as the long shadow cast forth in your shape under a late sun: stretched out upon the torture rack of the sidewalk, stretched beyond your body's natural shape; emaciated and dark, unrecognizable to yourself even though it is your self.
Anxiety is the ellipsis interjected inside of your sentence, guiding the eyes toward an unfinished thought and never finishing the statement with anything else but the panic of having to go on. And you will go on.
Anxiety is going to war and dreading that you will come back. It becomes your personal moment in Normandy, in your Fallujah, in your Mogadishu. You worry less about not coming back and more how you could ever come back.
If sorrow was Kierkegaard's castle, then anxiety is the rotted bridge that you can never finish crossing. The moat yawns below you with each step.
Anxiety isn't sorrow and it isn't depression. Anxiety wants to keep you alive, to keep the misery going. It accelerates your mind, races you toward a future that you don't want where you are decaying and dreadful but still alive. Depression would just as soon see you dead.
Anxiety is dreading the life to come after survival or, better, fear of survival; of living marked, cursed, never the same again. Anxiety is wearing the cage of rats around your head in Room 101, torturing you to the point that you desperately scream, “Do it to Julia! Not me!” except there is no Julia and there are no rats. There's no one to sacrifice for your peace of mind, no one to relinquish the fear-torture. You are your own Room 101 and after the torture, you can only stare a stare into something in a mirror that looks back and says without words meant to be forgiving or understanding, “I betrayed you.”
~
I remember the first time I felt it. I was in the 4th grade and called one of my friends an asshole under my breath. They didn't hear me but that didn't matter. I'd said a bad word and bad behavior like that was a punched ticket to Hell. The panic of having sinned, having trespassed against another human, of having done something that would curse my life from here on out was relentless. I worried all night about it. I prayed about it—back when I still felt that prayer could affect the human condition—and hoped salvation could be within reach later in life.
I was in fourth grade and already felt my life was over. Because of a word. Because of anxiety.
Excepting its occasional dormancy, anxiety has been cycling through me like that ever since. Expecting my life as I know it is over. Expecting the very worst possible ending.
~
Anxiety isn't always the fear of not being noticed. Sometimes it's the fear of being noticed because it confirms that you are not, in fact, invisible. All it takes is one person to remind you that you exist and that existence is plagued by anxiety. When other people notice you, you feel you must perform your best for these other people. It's the fear of having to perform and impress and pressured to do something that you know will fail. Beyond rejection, anxiety warms the face every time you have to perform because you know everybody will recognize in your crestfallen expression the moment you realize you have failed.
You can't help but betray yourself.
~
Anxiety is spending a lifetime dying even though death has forgotten you. Again, anxiety makes you immortal but without giving you any divine gift for survival other than waking up to another day to find anxiety waiting for you under your pillow like some demented tooth fairy's prize.
Anxiety makes a miracle of science out of you. In my own experience, I have been terminally diagnosed with everything that makes you dead and miserable and tainted yet I have survived seemingly unscathed except for the desperation anxiety leaves in its wake. I couldn't begin to tell you how many times I have been desperate: I have beaten cancer, I have overcome AIDS; chlamydia, toxoplasmosis, schizophrenia. I have survived blood parasites. I have survived them all.*
I have beat them all because they have all – and always – been in my head.
And all of them were only ever there because of my anxiety.
The irony that anxiety thrives on is that, my mental illnesses aside, I am a healthy adult male. I have never had so much as an allergic reaction in my life. Through risky decisions and stupid decisions, ranging from eating a raw egg to having unprotected sex, I am still somehow healthy (with the medical charts to prove it).
In spite of that gold medal track record, anxiety convincingly told me I was never going to be the same after any of it. Anxiety put the diseases in me and made me live through them long enough to survive them until good sense and medication kicked in. And then it was on to the next terminal condition.
I didn't get a physician's examination after every occasion because I didn't want the confirmation that my life was over (nor do I want to spend every waking moment of my life in a doctor's waiting lobby). Somehow, I illogically thought that I'd live longer if I didn't know I was dying. Through this terrible judgment, anxiety preserved me and I eventually no longer had the illness I feared I had. Anxiety is never wanting to know because knowing is the death knell, the toll for whom everybody mourns by you.
The very worst part is trying to distinguish between the voices of anxiety and good sense. They sound so similar in my head yet I have to find a way to discern between panicked response and educated response. I might have been right so far about what I suspected illnesses I've been examined for, but I don't go for every one of them. In this sense, anxiety may very well be killing me because it is increasingly difficult to determine what is legitimate and what is simply a product of my own corrupt mind.
That is anxiety. If you haven't survived it, you don't know it. It makes you desperate and bends you over backwards, forcing you to see the world in a way it really isn't. If you haven't felt the whisper of fear from depression's closest companion, you haven't known anxiety. Anxiety is not depression and it's not death, but it does enjoy masquerading as death's false harbinger.
*Thanks to anxiety, the author has also miraculously survived: HIV, brain cancer, syphilis, gum cancer, the clap, appendicitis, rabies, stomach cancer, herpes, multiple aneurisms, blood clots in the lungs, lung cancer, IBS, breast cancer, melanoma, MRSA, tuberculosis, histoplasmosis, kidney failure, testicular cancer, cirrhosis, anal cancer, multiple strokes, cardiomyopathy, several heart attacks, thyroid cancer, asphyxiation, some weird thing when he was eleven years old and couldn't get the smell of match sulfur out of his nose, lymphoma, throat cancer, and tonsillitis to name a few.
Friday, April 19, 2013
Windows and Mirrors
I made a Johari window, whatever good this is. I'm not exactly sure what the point of it is, but if you want to look at it and contribute to it, here it is.
Friday, November 2, 2012
Zero Fun
Seems many in my online community are blogging less these days. I really haven't devotedly kept up on any exercise of the sort in years. I start one, might post a couple of times, and then you end up with something like this: a post about once a month.
Oh well. I started a Tumblr, too, so that I can have something else to look forward to neglecting. I figure if I'm going to be an absent writer, I might as well cover all of my bases.
Hm, what else.
Oh, yeah. Election's coming up. Great.
Oh well. I started a Tumblr, too, so that I can have something else to look forward to neglecting. I figure if I'm going to be an absent writer, I might as well cover all of my bases.
Hm, what else.
Oh, yeah. Election's coming up. Great.
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