Some people’s depression goes away. Meanwhile, with brief bouts of relative cheerfulness, I’ve been in this current funk since, oh, early 2010. (I’m fun!) A common misperception that I have experienced every single day on occasion is that I am depressed because I am not trying hard enough to feel better. (Incidentally, that falls under the depression cure category called Not Really Helping.)
As much as I would love (love!) to wallow in self-pity, I have been trying. In fact, I have tried everything.
But I couldn’t prove it until now.
Before, you see, I couldn’t use Powerpoint.
I present to you conclusive proof that I have tried pretty much every depression cure I can think of.
I’m built like a mullet. Business in the front, party in the back. What is it about an awkward ten-or-eleven-year-old that screams, “please call attention to my body?” That was the time when my body started developing; my family fretted that I might be swaybacked and admonished me to stand up straight. At dances, the [...]
My grandmother’s mother, Mary Salter, is a mysterious fruit on our family tree, not quite shaded in. We know very little about her; she died around 1930, leaving two little girls under four who would torture themselves, for the rest of their lives, trying to remember her face. Family lore suggests that Mary was a [...]
I was raised to believe I could keep bad things from happening to me, as a woman, if I just followed certain rules. The women in my life, trying, no doubt, to protect me, taught me these rules. When a woman was abducted and killed while leaving a nighttime party in a miniskirt, I was [...]
I was one of the first generations to grow up with rap music. When I was a child (in the good old days of Reaganomics) rap fell into two categories: message rap (Public Enemy) and party rap (Run D.M.C.). Message rap discussed politics and institutional racism and other important things. (Sometimes, but not always, Flavor [...]
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
I have been a lonely Jew on Christmas for nearly ten years now, and, each year, my tolerance for fail-Christmas songs lowers perceptibly. Part of it, I know, is merely old age: when I was a child, every Wham! “Last Christmas” or NKOTB “Funky Christmas” brought me closer to an obscene quantity of disposable plastic [...]
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Upon the release of her private diaries, the (British) world was recently shocked to discover that beloved children’s author Alison Uttley, was, apparently, not very nice: She created the enduringly charming children’s characters Little Grey Rabbit and Fuzzypeg the Hedgehog but the private diaries of Alison Uttley reveal the author to have been a controlling, [...]
Thursday, September 10, 2009
I think this is less post than rant. I read an interesting post on Racialicious last week, from the point of view of an MFA student who has realized that writers of color are, largely, not being taught to new practitioners of the craft. Even blockbuster authors like Toni Morrison are relegated to Ethnic Studies [...]
