Archive for tag Hope
June 29, 2008 at 06:45 AM
Even this late out into the game, I find myself still hoping for a reprieve from a life devoid of tender companionship, a life destined to loneliness and continued struggle.
I mean, c’mon, even Jesus Christ asked God to see if he could somehow defer crucifixion.
Despite what all the novels and movies say, the three magic words don’t do as much as you think they do. It’s the actions behind them that count.
And while I’m starting to recognize that I’m totally falling in love with her, I am frightened.
Frightened that I won’t do the right things, and that I’ll drive her away. Either I will go too quickly, or move too slowly. I’m frightened that, in the end, she’ll flee from me, and we won’t even be friends at that point.
Let me tell you, experience is a painful teacher.
But despie the current odds, I still hope. We’ll just have to see
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June 28, 2008 at 12:49 PM
No, I haven’t watched it yet, so there aren’t any spoilers. I just read the review in the L.A. Times from yesterday, and it seems like it would be very much my movie, the way, I suppose, I got obsessed with “Beauty and the Beast”, even.
The sense of the protagonist’s shy, tentative optimism despite the overwhelming sense of loneliness, abandonment, and alienation that is already just palpable in the 5 min trailer is a little heartbreaking.
I can relate.
OK, I should’ve warned you, Kenneth Turan’s review of Wall-E does have a few details that could be construed as spoilers, although it doesn’t actually give any part of the plot away. The details make it sound almost like something that Douglas Adams would write.
Wall-E (which stands for Waste Allocator/Loader/Lifter - Earth Class, basically an autonomous, intelligent trash compactor) is the only sentience that seems to remain on Earth, excluding insects. He is tasked with the goal of reducing the amount of space all of the Earth’s garbage takes up.
Seemingly at odds with the typical Disney stereotype of “singing Zippy-dee-doo-dah out of your asshole”, “Wall-E” starts off with a rather dystopian vision of a planetary eco-catastrophe. The writers take our fears about rampant global capitalism and the inexorable expansion of the consumer culture, and they extrapolate them to their logical conclusion: the Earth basically becomes one large toxic landfill from which every human has fled, cavorting off into space polluting the rest of the universe too. The vision of lonely ruins of modern cities buried in garbage is extremely haunting, mostly because its probably going to be right.
And yet, despite this utterly hopeless desolation, you get the sense that Wall-E can’t help but harbor a spark of hope. As meager as his existence is, he finds small, meaningless joys in small, probably ultimately meaningless tasks. But none of this fulfills the need for companionship. For communion. For connection.
In a literal act of deus ex machina, EVE (which stands for Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) arrives on the planet, armed with a high-energy laser cannon. She is apparently the herald of the exiled, morbidly obese, wanton and gluttonous humans who have been living on interstellar cruise ships since the mass exodus—reminding me very much of the Golgafrincham B class as created by Douglas Adams in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe—an acerbic, sardonic send-up of humanity as a whole. Idiots, the lot of them. And that is where the mostly predictable plot begins.
Still, maybe that’s all there is to life. While I’ve had my moments of companionship, communion, and connection, they have, for the most part, been brief exercises, not going too deep, not getting too difficult. People slide in and out of life like set pieces. As long as you don’t ask too much, you’ll get by, but you won’t get much, either.
And it seems the moments that I’ve tried to bridge the gap, tried to reach out and go for something more meaningful have all been shot to shit somehow.
There’s no point in connecting closely, meaningfully, to anyone, because no one wants to be that close to me, and even if they did at the beginning, in the end, they leave as fast as they can physically go.
Times like these, I end up asking: why continue to burden the universe with my existence?
It would be one thing to be bitter and angry about all this, to learn all the wrong lessons. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Get yours while the getting is good. Fuck everyone else. But all of that is pretty much just as meaningless as my one-dimensional existence of microscopic, ultimately meaningless, achievements. Why trade in one set of nonsense for a whole new set of nonsense, when the current set gets me nowhere just as well as the new set probably would?
So, instead, I’m just sad. And I wake up in the morning like everybody else, take a shower, get dressed, go to work. If I’m lucky, some of the meaningless little things I do will actually have measurable results, no matter how small.
Like I said, it’s not that there aren’t awesome people around me who are looking for deeper meaning in life. But they can usually find someone less mentally convoluted and more physically attractive than I am.
Bn likes to say that I’ve never (or at least, almost never) tried, and that’s why it hasn’t worked out for me all these years, and maybe it’s true. But each year I’m a little more tired. The gangrene affecting my soul advances just a little bit. Each advance, I feel less and less pain. Eventually I won’t be able to feel a damn thing at all, and then they can rip my soul out of me and I won’t even flinch.
Only hope can keep me together.
Love can mend your heart, but love can break your heart.
—”Message in a Bottle” by the Police
Then again, when we’re talking about someone who is just awesome in so many ways, even just being friends with her is probably more than I deserve.
Small victories. Little triumphs.
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June 12, 2008 at 08:57 PM
What does it really mean to be done? I’ve got 17 days of formal education left. I’m trying to be as optimistic as I’ve ever been about the future, but I’m just not an optimistic type of guy. I don’t know. I’m more of a giddy cynic. A hopeful pessimist. The mantra of my profession seems to be “Hope for the best, but expect the worst.”
I can’t be too Eeyore-like about it, though. I mean, I know for a concrete fact that there are a lot of people who are far more miserable than I am. And I’m not even talking about people in places like Afghanistan and Burma. All I have to remember is that I don’t have metastatic cancer, I have lungs that actually work, I’m not short of breath all the time, I don’t have a breathing tube down my throat, and I have all my limbs. (Just to reference a few conditions I’ve run across of at work, of people who are clearly in worse shape than I am.)
But this whole despair thing can really get a guy down. As a morbid exercise, I decided to rank the ways I’m probably going to die. The way it currently stands is as follows:
- suicide
- high-speed motor vehicle accident
- coronary artery disease/acute myocardial infarction
- cerebrovascular disease/stroke
Seriously, though? I’m starting to worry about #1 a lot. Thankfully, the rapidly increasing price of gas is actually making the likelihood of #2 decrease. I can minimize #2 by minimizing the time I spend on the road. I mean, sure, I could always get hit by a bus, but I could also get hit by a hurtling meteorite, too. Life is uncertain, you know?
#3 and #4 are also minimizeable. If I actually ate right and exercised, I would probably survive at least 35-40 more years. But as I continue my sedentary lifestyle and refuse to do anything about it, #3 and #4 are going at it head-on, and are neck-and-neck.
But #1. I’ve got no way of knowing. Most days I’m OK. While certain things can be arduous, most days are purpose-filled and even possibly inspiring.
But then there are moments where I’m gripped with heavy, aching dread, and my mind is filled with the horror of years upon years of vapid, vacuous living, and the thought of living through them all is so onerous that suicide seems to be the only rational course of action.
Right now, I’ve got no incentive to make something better of myself. I’m not exactly sure what I’m waiting for. I’m starting to doubt if there might actually be something that would be able to stick its foot in my ass and make me get going. I like to wax poetic that if I found love, then there might be a reason. But that’s a pie-in-the-sky. Where I’m at right now, I’m pretty damn unloveable. While a lot of women are totally into “bad boy” personas, I really just suck in an irredeemable fashion. Nothing hot or sexy about it.
Certainly, a lot of this is rooted in some serious self-confidence issues. You would think that, by mere dint of getting to where I’ve gotten, I’d have some sort of modicum of self-pride. At least that’s how I imagine a rational person would behave.
But there’s been nothing. For some reason, despite the realization that life really hasn’t been all that horrible, I can’t seem to find a comforting memory that is unequivocally positive. Every triumph in my life seems to be interspersed with some sort of awful sacrifice. Every victory seems pyrrhic. Every moment of joy is tempered with sorrow.
See, what we have here is what psychiatrists like to call a “cognitive error.” The problem with depressed people is that they always tend to hang on to the very ideas that are driving them down their path of self-destruction.
If I could just realize—and actually accept—that my life doesn’t really suck at all, and that there have been some good times in my life that haven’t been tainted by the bad, then I might actually get somewhere.
I’ve read books. I’ve talked to mental health professionals. I’ve studied this disease from end-to-end, and while I understand the techniques, and know all the data, intellectually speaking, I just don’t feel it. I just can’t seem to navigate my way to self-healing, which is ultimately the thing that must happen. I can visit shrinks all I want, every day even, for the rest of my life. But I realize that they can only point me in the right direction. I’m the one who actually has to get there.
Until then, #1 is still going to be there. I’ve managed to stay ahead of the (generally favorable) odds so far. But that bullet is still in one of those chambers, and until I actually stop pulling that trigger all the time, one of these days I may just strike true, causing needless pain and sorrow to the few people who might actually care.
Ever since I’ve been caught up in my crisis of faith (fast approaching seven years now! Woot!) I’ve kind of abandoned spirituality. I mean, I feel like I’ve come to grips with the possibility that a hyperintelligent, disembodied entity (whom, for convenience, we could call God) may very well be trying extremely subtly to drive human history, but that’s as far as I’ve made it.
But it occurred to me that moments like these are exactly what prayer is for. Which is a complex topic that will probably have to wait for another post. (But for all you immature so-called Christians out there who use prayer to wish for material things, and to wish God’s violent intervention against your enemies, you can all suck ass and choke on dingleberries for all I care.)
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May 21, 2008 at 12:49 AM
Throwbacks stuck in the ‘80’s seem to have a hard time accepting the Brave New World™ we find ourselves in. I’m not preaching some magical transformation of human nature. It’s just that the game has changed. There’s a transition under way, and we are slowly weaning ourselves from the past.
The ‘80’s was all about greed and self-interest. It was a simpler time. We had an archetypal enemy—Soviet Russia—and defeat meant succumbing to totalitarianism or being immolated in a nuclear holocaust. The rule of the day was every man and woman for themself, and you either got rich, or you ended up homeless. And as if we were trapped in some Calvinistic time warp, the former were assumed to be virtuous, the latter were assumed to have some flaw in their character. Alex P. Keaton and Gordon Gekko were the heroes of the decade. Ronald Reagan was their God.
But you can’t really sustain prosperity when only 2% of the population has almost all the wealth. You only need so many washing machines, you know? And when the economy goes to hell, whoever is at the helm takes the blame. It doesn’t help that trickle-down economics is a mad fantasy, and that its natural trajectory is into the shitter. So Bill Clinton took up the mantle, ushering in a new era.
I’m not entirely convinced that it was complete coincidence that the Internet happened to take off during the Pax Clintonia. 1994 was a seminal year, and the seeds for the change were planted deep. A disjunction was inevitable.
You could argue that the Information Revolution really started in the early ‘80’s, when the personal computer came to the fore. But if you examine the microcomputer culture, it really was a relic of the 1960’s UNIX hacker age, replete with communal tendencies. We spent hours distributing copies of software to each other, legal or not. While we never laid down the legalese like Stallman did, we accepted a culture of share and share alike. Code was exchanged freely. We chatted on rudimentary proprietary social networks and on the lonely frontier of the BBS.
It was a wonderfully chaotic age, when multiple brands of computers each had part of the market, and developers dutifully released their games to each of them. Commodore, Atari, Apple, Tandy/Radio Shack, IBM. Those were the giants of the era.
Ironically, it wasn’t until one of the first technological disruptions came to the fore that Bill Gates decided to try and lock down the OS market. The first IBM clone was released in the late ‘80’s, allowing anyone with a few million dollars to contract with Intel and create their own computer that ran the vast amount of PC-DOS/MS-DOS software. The proprietary all-in-one computer was essentially dead (although I kept using my C64 until the early ‘90’s) and Apple (with the Macintosh) and Commodore (with the Amiga) clung tenuously to their scant market share, not yet making the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit. Intel’s 80386 secured the supremacy of the IBM-compatible platform. It was the only 32-bit CPU available to consumers.
The sad thing was that IBM architecture was the least advanced when it came to multimedia. Even with the C64, you already had four-voice polyphonic sound. The Macs and the Amigas of that era would not be surpassed by IBM-compatibles until well into the ‘90’s, when the multimedia became the Next Big Thing™ At the time, IBM-compatibles had EGA displays and a pathetic speaker. Oh, VGA was within reach, and you could always get an AdLib sound card, but these were extra, whereas on the Mac and the Amiga, advanced display capabilities and sound were built-in.
We finally entered the world of the GUI wholesale with the release of Windows 3.0, finally (and barely) catching up with the interfaces of the Mac and the Amiga. But, hell, even the C64 could run a GUI in those days.
The world of software was no longer the unregulated free-for-all of the early ‘80’s. EULAs and copyrights were the rule of the day. Businesses were audited by the Software Protection Agency, and pirates were hung out to dry. IBM-compatibles came at best with an antiquated version of BASIC, and that was the best you were going to get for free. While BASIC was good enough for the C64 and the Apple IIc, an entire decade had already elapsed, and the thought of running an interpreted language on a 33 MHz machine was laughable. It would be a little while before gcc was dutifully ported to first MS-DOS, then to Win32. Eventually, Microsoft released a crippled, interpreted version of QuickBasic with the newest versions of MS-DOS, but that was even clunkier, and you certainly couldn’t write Windows apps that way.
Then 1994 happened. The sensational news was the release of NCSA Mosaic, but deep underground, the Open Source movement was gaining momentum.
A lot of people learned the wrong lessons from the rupture of the first tech bubble. The conventional wisdom was that we were going to revert to old business practices, and that an Internet-based economy was a pipe dream. Enter 15 years later, and boy, was conventional wisdom ever wrong. In spite of the bubble popping, or perhaps precisely because of it, the Open Source movement came to the foreground, led by Red Hat at the time. In 1998, Linux was already a viable replacement for Windows 98, and it crashed far less.
We entered a new culture of development, one that could not rely on top-down pronouncements from on high. It became a messy, consensus-seeking dramafest, with lots of shouting, and lots of forking.
Democracy in action.
Or as ESR put it, the bazaar became pre-eminent.
Except this wasn’t a new culture, but the old culture from the ‘60’s hacker days writ large. Level of contribution, fame, and importance was measured by your intelligence, and how much you contributed. An imperfect meritocracy developed. Sociologists of the day liked to use the term “gift culture”, and this was certainly a consideration, but they failed utterly to document what was really going on: trust became the new currency.
If something came from RMS or ESR or Linus Torvalds or Alan Cox, you knew it was going to be good. Names became saleable commodities. Branding had always been important, but now branding was the important thing. The customer’s trust was the most important thing you could gain, and if you could manage to keep their trust, they were yours for life.
This is the path Google took. Why did Google end up entering the Modern English language as a verb? Because we learned to trust its search results. That trust translates into the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The moment we stop trusting those search results would mark the beginning of the end.
When Steve came back to town and took the helm of Apple again, he rode this lesson to its logical conclusion. Why do Mac users keep coming back, even as they complain about crashes and clunkiness? Because they know what they’re going to get from Steve. Everybody thought that the iPod was a futile gesture, a Quixotic tilting at windmills. Instead, the iPod is the new Walkman. Even as micro-hard drives fail and iPods crash and become unusable, we still keep coming back.
The flip side of trust is that we also all learned that Windows sucks. Reboot, reformat, and reinstall was the reliable mantra. Not crashing was a miracle. We learned that trying to install anything that might improve the usability of your Windows box was liable to make it unbootable, so we stayed stuck in this awful limbo of crap functionality and inability to upgrade said functionality without Microsoft holding our hands and pushing out a new service pack. Windows suckitude had become so reliable that when XP finally came out, we were shocked that it wasn’t half-bad. Oh, sure, it could be taken over by malware writers in a few minutes after connecting to the Net, but the fact that it could even connect to the net without multiple reboots and animal sacrifice was a minor miracle. Even now, a lot of people distrust the notion that XP is not utter crap.
Trust also comes to fore when it comes to the atrocious phenomenon of spam. Now, some people are just too trusting, and probably shouldn’t be trusted with complete freedom, but I’m not the boss of other people, so I have to live with morons actually buying crap from spammers.
And even though spammers and the shady companies that they work for make a ton of money with their unethical business practices, it is conventional wisdom that spammers are the scum of the earth, on the level of crack dealers and pedophiles. We wouldn’t want to interact with a spammer in meatspace, that’s for sure. So anyone who is* a spammer has to keep their identity hidden, like all those high-end prostitutes and CIA spooks. Hell, we’ve even managed to *criminalize spam. Who’d’ve thunk it?
A spammer is pretty much at the bottom of the trust pile.
So we’re in an age where branding and maintaining trust is critical. Gone are the days where you would be trusted just because you were an authority. People demand evidence, and corroboration. Hence, smart scientists are publishing their results not just to traditional journals, but to open-access ones too. We have websites that allows us to rate everything from the last movie we watched, to the grocery store we shopped at, to what we think of our primary care physician. We search Google carefully before we buy big-ticket items.
I think it’s harder to scam people or to bully people these days. You have to earn trust, and coercive behavior only makes you lose trust.
Being a selfish asshole is not the selective advantage it used to be. While we haven’t magically turned into ideal communists singing “Kumbaya” and “Imagine” by the campfire, cooperation earns you more trust than cut-throat, back-stabby competition. Being able to navigate reasonably well in a social situation—either in meatspace *or* in metaspace—without appearing like a pervert or a serial killer is part and parcel of earning trust.
Fucktards get exposed on the Internet. And Google remembers everything. You can’t hide under the cloak of authority any more. While I’m not completely high and think we have complete transparency, I believe it is now easier for the common person to make sure that someone isn’t trying to pull a fast one. The perhaps unearned authoritative voice of traditional media has been diluted considerably. And I think the Internet deserves a lot of the credit for preventing the neocons from turning the U.S. entirely into some Orwellian nightmare. They were close, but we dodged a bullet. Now even Google knows that W is a miserable failure.
I’m not so drunk on the Kool-Aid to believe that the Internet is going to solve all the considerable problems we’re facing. After all, the economy is in the shitter once again. Rogue states like North Korea have nuclear weapons. Climate change is going to give new, tragic meaning to the phrase “water wars.” Trust in American Democracy took huge hits in the last two elections, thanks to the Supreme Court and Diebold, respectively. W is the first president since James Madison to actually have an entire American city destroyed completely under his watch. We all know what’s still going on in New Orleans, no matter what sort bullshit the traditional media is trying to feed us.
But for once, I’m hopeful. Today, the Republican Party that Nixon and Reagan built is pretty much in disarray. Its brand is tarnished beyond all recognition, and about the only thing we trust will come of it are unhinged religious fundamentalists who want to abolish science, homosexual men who are in denial (such as Larry Craig), and all manner of obscene corruption (such as Enron and Duke Cunningham.) Only a completely deranged ass-monkey would trust a Republican farther than they could kick them.
And remember this: trust is the basis of hope. If you can’t trust anything, there’s no way you can be hopeful, and without hope, you’re doomed to stagnation and eventually death. Hope is a lot more than an empty platitude that politicians like to throw around. Hope is pretty much the operational basis of frontal lobe function. One of the major differences between humans and non-verbal animals is the fact that we are able to imagine what isn’t. It isn’t just a random amalgamation of buzzwords when people speak about vision and mission statements. Without vision, there’s no way to direct your movement. If you’re not forward-thinking, then you’re barely functioning beyond the level of a non-verbal animal. We are motivated and driven by the hope of turning what does not exist into actual reality. This concept is more commonly termed creativity.
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April 25, 2008 at 06:47 PM
Now the world has gone to bed,
Darkness won’t engulf my head,
I can see by infrared,
How I hate the night.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
Try to count electric sheep,
Sweet dream wishes you can keep,
How I hate the night.
—Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I’m not sure what came over me last night. Like I said, I didn’t really do much work. The night was spectacularly quiet, and my black cloud failed to manifest itself. Either that, or my pager had decided to fail, but I woke up once or twice in the middle of the night to make sure it was really still working.
Instead, I surfed the internet, hearkening back to those long ago days when I was an intern, flailing around as night float, doing nothing but sitting in front of the puter, occasionally running in a panic to put out a fire.
And while I kept myself occupied by trying to restart my blog, nonetheless a seeping loneliness crept upon me, and I just felt forlorn.
Maybe it’s just my depression relapsing.
Times like these, it’s hard to remember the Art of Not Wanting. Interestingly, despite being anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist, this sentiment nonetheless has managed to seep into the mainstream.
If you love someone, set them free
This actually echoes the Taoist sentiment that to hold onto something or someone, you must let them go. Or there’s always good ol’ JC, in Luke 9:24, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.”
And there’s this verse that S. texted me once, which pretty much sums up what unconditional love is:
Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
“You owe Me.”
Look what happens with a love like that.
It lights the whole sky.
—Hafiz
I seem to have a penchant for unrequited love. Now, Br. long ago deconstructed this flaw in my character. It’s simply a manifestation of my avoidant personality. Since I know that the situation is impossible, it’s safe. Since I know from the start that I’m going to fail, I don’t have to worry about anything.
It’s a perfect scam. It’s too bad that there’s actually a part of me that wants to be loved in return.
I didn’t run into Don Quixote de la Mancha until I was a senior in high school, primarily through the musical “Man of La Mancha”, but afterwards, through the brilliant novel by Cervantes. I never did finish it in its entirety, though.
I’ve never been called “quixotic” to my face, by I’m sure it must’ve crossed the minds of some of my friends and acquaintances.
But naturally, I grew obsessed with the song “The Impossible Dream”:
This is my quest:
To follow that star,
no matter how hopeless,
no matter how far;
to fight for the right
without question or pause;
to be willing to march into Hell
for a heavenly cause.
And I know if I’ll only be true
to this glorious quest,
that my heart will lie peaceful and calm
when I’m laid to my rest.
And the world will be better for this,
that one man, scorned and covered with scars,
still strove with his last ounce of courage
to reach the unreachable star.
Looks like I’m still looking for Dulcinea, doomed to forever love pure and chaste from afar.
After work, though, I grabbed a large cup of coffee and sat in my car by the beach, watching the crashing waves and the surfers who braved them. For some reason—possibly entirely pharmacologically-mediated by the caffeine—my mood lifted up as I drove home. The morning always looks better after some coffee.
Later today, I found myself thinking: there’s got to be an orthogonal solution to this. There’s got to be a way for me to beat my fear of rejection and be able to tell people how I feel about them, without hoping for anything in return.
And I recognize very acutely that if I can’t take care of myself, if I can’t love myself, there’s no way in hell that I can actually love another person. It’s just logistically impossible. If I don’t have all my shit together, how can I possibly be any good for anyone?
And at last, it comes full circle. If I learn to love the world and the people and things in it for who/what they are, and not for what I wish them to be, no matter how fucked up everything is, no matter how evil people can be, unconditionally, whole-heartedly, without expecting anything in return, then maybe I can learn to love myself for what I am, even knowing that I am badly broken and horrendously imperfect. To put it in terms of Darwinism, the only options are to grow, change, or die, and despite how I feel some days, I really don’t want to die. At least not quite yet.
I finally recognize, perhaps years and maybe decades too late, that life is impossible without love. And even if no one in the world loves me, I’ve got to at least love myself. I’ve got to believe that there’s a seed of something great inside of me, it just needs to germinate and take root.
Seeing the world in this light, sure it’s fucked up, beyond belief, and possibly beyond repair, but, to use a contemporary, hackishly trite phrase, it is what it is.
R has often quoted “Buckaroo Banzai” to me: No matter where you go, there you are.
This is not about resting on my laurels. This is, ultimately, about believing that, even though there are a lot of things wrong with me now, I can get better. Slowly, maybe imperceptibly so, but if I make the effort, given enough time, there will be a change. There’s no reason why every day has to be like every other day, fraught with total insanity, mind-crushing depression, and abject desperation. Change will be excruciatingly painful in the beginning, but what have I got to lose if I’m already hurting this bad?
Change for the better is possible. And I can make it happen. If I just keep believing this—and I see no good reason why I shouldn’t—then one day I might actually make something of myself. Not just a guy with a title, with a few pieces of paper that all say I’m over-educated. More than that. It’s possible that some day, I can be a person that’s worth falling in love with.
P.S. anytime I start feeling sorry for myself again, please remind me that I wrote this.
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March 04, 2008 at 08:10 PM
This morning NPR’s Renee Montagne interviewed Donald Ritchie, author of Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932. He seems to implicitly, tacitly compare FDR to Obama, noting that when FDR was campaigning, he stuck to a message of optimism, without getting mired in the specifics. He also pointed out that in 1932, the choice seemed to be between FDR’s message of hope and Herbert Hoover’s message of fear.
Ever since September 2001, I’ve kept FDR’s 70+ year old message in my heart, as an antidote to the fear-mongering and pathologic lying of the Bush Administration, the lame-brainedness and near-total worthlessness of the Department of Homeland Security, and the ignorance of some Americans who think all brown-skinned people are terrorists, who wanted to stupidly invade Iraq when our enemy was in Afghanistan, who probably couldn’t even find Iraq on a map.
So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.
—[Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first inaugural speech, given on March 4, 1932][2]
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December 29, 2007 at 10:18 AM
I read Barack Obama’s speech and felt like I had to post it (originally on Politico.com):
Ten months ago, I stood on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill., and began an unlikely journey to change America.
I did not run for the presidency to fulfill some long-held ambition or because I believed it was somehow owed to me. I chose to run in this election — at this moment — because of what Dr. King called “the fierce urgency of now.” Because we are at a defining moment in our history. Our nation is at war. Our planet is in peril. Our health care system is broken, our economy is out of balance, our education system fails too many of our children, and our retirement system is in tatters.
At this defining moment, we cannot wait any longer for universal health care. We cannot wait to fix our schools. We cannot wait for good jobs, and living wages, and pensions we can count on. We cannot wait to halt global warming, and we cannot wait to end this war in Iraq.
I chose to run because I believed that the size of these challenges had outgrown the capacity of our broken and divided politics to solve them; because I believed that Americans of every political stripe were hungry for a new kind of politics, a politics that focused not just on how to win but why we should, a politics that focused on those values and ideals that we held in common as Americans; a politics that favored common sense over ideology, straight talk over spin.
Most of all, I believed in the power of the American people to be the real agents of change in this country — because we are not as divided as our politics suggests; because we are a decent, generous people willing to work hard and sacrifice for future generations; and I was certain that if we could just mobilize our voices to challenge the special interests that dominate Washington and challenge ourselves to reach for something better, there was no problem we couldn’t solve — no destiny we couldn’t fulfill.
Ten months later, Iowa, you have vindicated that faith. You’ve come out in the blistering heat and the bitter cold not just to cheer, but to challenge — to ask the tough questions; to lift the hood and kick the tires; to serve as one place in America where someone who hasn’t spent their life in the Washington spotlight can get a fair hearing.
You’ve earned the role you play in our democracy because no one takes it more seriously. And I believe that’s true this year more than ever because, like me, you feel that same sense of urgency.
All across this state, you’ve shared with me your stories. And all too often they’ve been stories of struggle and hardship.
I’ve heard from seniors who were betrayed by CEOs who dumped their pensions while pocketing bonuses, and from those who still can’t afford their prescriptions because Congress refused to negotiate with the drug companies for the cheapest available price.
I’ve met Maytag workers who labored all their lives only to see their jobs shipped overseas; who now compete with their teenagers for $7-an-hour jobs at Wal-Mart.
I’ve spoken with teachers who are working at doughnut shops after school just to make ends meet, who are still digging into their own pockets to pay for school supplies.
Just two weeks ago, I heard a young woman in Cedar Rapids who told me she only gets three hours of sleep because she works the night shift after a full day of college and still can’t afford health care for a sister with cerebral palsy. She spoke not with self-pity but with determination, and wonders why the government isn’t doing more to help her afford the education that will allow her to live out her dreams.
I’ve spoken to veterans who talk with pride about what they’ve accomplished in Afghanistan and Iraq, but who nevertheless think of those they’ve left behind and question the wisdom of our mission in Iraq; the mothers weeping in my arms over the memories of their sons; the disabled or homeless vets who wonder why their service has been forgotten.
And I’ve spoken to Americans in every corner of the state, patriots all, who wonder why we have allowed our standing in the world to decline so badly, so quickly. They know this has not made us safer. They know that we must never negotiate out of fear, but that we must never fear to negotiate with our enemies as well as our friends. They are ashamed of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and warrantless wiretaps and ambiguity on torture. They love their country and want its cherished values and ideals restored.
It is precisely because you’ve experienced these frustrations, and seen the cost of inaction in your own lives, that you understand why we can’t afford to settle for the same old politics. You know that we can’t afford to allow the insurance lobbyists to kill health care reform one more time, and the oil lobbyists to keep us addicted to fossil fuels because no one stood up and took their power away when they had the chance.
You know that we can’t afford four more years of the same divisive food fight in Washington that’s about scoring political points instead of solving problems; that’s about tearing your opponents down instead of lifting this country up.
We can’t afford the same politics of fear that tells Democrats that the only way to look tough on national security is to talk, act and vote like George Bush Republicans; that invokes 9/11 as a way to scare up votes instead of a challenge that should unite all Americans to defeat our real enemies.
We can’t afford to be so worried about losing the next election that we lose the battles we owe to the next generation.
The real gamble in this election is playing the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expecting a different result. And that’s a risk we can’t take. Not this year. Not when the stakes are this high.
In this election, it is time to turn the page. In seven days, it is time to stand for change.
This has been our message since the beginning of this campaign. It was our message when we were down, and our message when we were up. And it must be catching on, because in these last few weeks, everyone is talking about change.
But you can’t at once argue that you’re the master of a broken system in Washington and offer yourself as the person to change it. You can’t fall in line behind the conventional thinking on issues as profound as war and offer yourself as the leader who is best prepared to chart a new and better course for America.
The truth is, you can have the right kind of experience and the wrong kind of experience. Mine is rooted in the real lives of real people and it will bring real results if we have the courage to change. I believe deeply in those words. But they are not mine. They were Bill Clinton’s in 1992, when Washington insiders questioned his readiness to lead.
My experience is rooted in the lives of the men and women on the South Side of Chicago who I fought for as an organizer when the local steel plant closed. It’s rooted in the lives of the people I stood up for as a civil rights lawyer when they were denied opportunity on the job or justice at the voting booth because of what they looked like or where they came from. It’s rooted in an understanding of how the world sees America that I gained from living, traveling and having family beyond our shores — an understanding that led me to oppose this war in Iraq from the start. It’s experience rooted in the real lives of real people, and it’s the kind of experience Washington needs right now.
There are others in this race who say that this kind of change sounds good, but that I’m not angry or confrontational enough to get it done.
Well, let me tell you something, Iowa. I don’t need any lectures on how to bring about change, because I haven’t just talked about it on the campaign trail. I’ve fought for change all my life.
I walked away from a job on Wall Street to bring job training to the jobless and after-school programs to kids on the streets of Chicago.
I turned down the big-money law firms to win justice for the powerless as a civil rights lawyer.
I took on the lobbyists in Illinois and brought Democrats and Republicans together to expand health care to 150,000 people and pass the first major campaign finance reform in 25 years; and I did the same thing in Washington when we passed the toughest lobbying reform since Watergate. I’m the only candidate in this race who hasn’t just talked about taking power away from lobbyists, I’ve actually done it. So if you want to know what kind of choices we’ll make as president, you should take a look at the choices we made when we had the chance to bring about change that wasn’t easy or convenient.
That’s the kind of change that’s more than just rhetoric — that’s change you can believe in.
It’s change that won’t just come from more anger at Washington or turning up the heat on Republicans. There’s no shortage of anger and bluster and bitter partisanship out there. We don’t need more heat. We need more light. I’ve learned in my life that you can stand firm in your principles while still reaching out to those who might not always agree with you. And although the Republican operatives in Washington might not be interested in hearing what we have to say, I think Republican and independent voters outside of Washington are. That’s the once-in-a-generation opportunity we have in this election.
For the first time in a long time, we have the chance to build a new majority of not just Democrats, but independents and Republicans who’ve lost faith in their Washington leaders but want to believe again — who desperately want something new.
We can change the electoral math that’s been all about division and make it about addition — about building a coalition for change and progress that stretches through blue states and red states. That’s how I won some of the reddest, most Republican counties in Illinois. That’s why the polls show that I do best against the Republicans running for president — because we’re attracting more support from independents and Republicans than any other candidate. That’s how we’ll win in November and that’s how we’ll change this country over the next four years.
In the end, the argument we are having between the candidates in the last seven days is not just about the meaning of change. It’s about the meaning of hope. Some of my opponents appear scornful of the word; they think it speaks of naiveté, passivity and wishful thinking.
But that’s not what hope is. Hope is not blind optimism. It’s not ignoring the enormity of the task before us or the roadblocks that stand in our path. Yes, the lobbyists will fight us. Yes, the Republican attack dogs will go after us in the general election. Yes, the problems of poverty and climate change and failing schools will resist easy repair. I know — I’ve been on the streets; I’ve been in the courts. I’ve watched legislation die because the powerful held sway and good intentions weren’t fortified by political will, and I’ve watched a nation get misled into war because no one had the judgment or the courage to ask the hard questions before we sent our troops to fight.
But I also know this. I know that hope has been the guiding force behind the most improbable changes this country has ever made. In the face of tyranny, it’s what led a band of colonists to rise up against an Empire. In the face of slavery, it’s what fueled the resistance of the slave and the abolitionist, and what allowed a president to chart a treacherous course to ensure that the nation would not continue half slave and half free. In the face of war and Depression, it’s what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation. In the face of oppression, it’s what led young men and women to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through the streets of Selma and Montgomery for freedom’s cause. That’s the power of hope — to imagine, and then work for, what had seemed impossible before.
That’s the change we seek. And that’s the change you can stand for in seven days.
We’ve already beaten odds that the cynics said couldn’t be beaten. When we started 10 months ago, they said we couldn’t run a different kind of campaign.
They said we couldn’t compete without taking money from Washington lobbyists. But you proved them wrong when we raised more small donations from more Americans than any other campaign in history.
They said we couldn’t be successful if we didn’t have the full support of the establishment in Washington. But you proved them wrong when we built a grass-roots movement that could forever change the face of American politics.
They said we wouldn’t have a chance in this campaign unless we resorted to the same old negative attacks. But we resisted, even when we were written off, and ran a positive campaign that pointed out real differences and rejected the politics of slash and burn.
And now, in seven days, you have a chance once again to prove the cynics wrong. In seven days, what was improbable has the chance to beat what Washington said was inevitable. And that’s why in these last weeks, Washington is fighting back with everything it has — with attack ads and insults; with distractions and dishonesty; with millions of dollars from outside groups and undisclosed donors to try and block our path.
We’ve seen this script many times before. But I know that this time can be different.
Because I know that when the American people believe in something, it happens.
If you believe, then we can tell the lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over.
If you believe, then we can stop making promises to America’s workers and start delivering — jobs that pay, health care that’s affordable, pensions you can count on, and a tax cut for working Americans instead of the companies who send their jobs overseas.
If you believe, we can offer a world-class education to every child, and pay our teachers more, and make college dreams a reality for every American.
If you believe, we can save this planet and end our dependence on foreign oil.
If you believe, we can end this war, close Guantanamo, restore our standing, renew our diplomacy and once again respect the Constitution of the United States of America.
That’s the future within our reach. That’s what hope is — that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better is waiting for us around the corner. But only if we’re willing to work for it and fight for it. To shed our fears and our doubts and our cynicism. To glory in the task before us of remaking this country block by block, precinct by precinct, county by county, state by state.
There is a moment in the life of every generation when, if we are to make our mark on history, this spirit must break through.
This is the moment.
This is our time.
And if you will stand with me in seven days — if you will stand for change so that our children have the same chance that somebody gave us; if you’ll stand to keep the American dream alive for those who still hunger for opportunity and thirst for justice; if you’re ready to stop settling for what the cynics tell you you must accept, and finally reach for what you know is possible, then we will win this caucus, we will win this election, we will change the course of history, and the real journey — to heal a nation and repair the world — will have truly begun.
Thank you.
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December 23, 2007 at 12:07 AM
The words come bubbling up all of the sudden
There are no happy endings, because nothing ever ends.
The light at the end of the tunnel
becomes the first gasp of air
lungs burning, heart straining
breaking through the water’s surface
at the end comes the start
and it is never finished
and the long count begins again
(If I could just win through without breaking
not stumble and fall as I cross the threshold
is it too much to ask not to have to crawl across the finish line?)
blood-stained, streaked with tears, covered in sweat
I will get there
ever unlooked for, unheralded, unwanted
my destiny is inexorable
and this cup will not pass
there is, and always will be
the sunlight
and the blue sky
and maybe my heart will sing just a little
and forget the decades of sorrow for a moment
there is starlight, moonlight
to guide my path
always seeking, always searching
But you must remind me, little one. When I… when I lose myself—when I lose her—you must remind me that I am still searching, still waiting… that I have never forgotten her, never turned from all she taught me. I sit in this place… I sit… but in my mind, in my poor mind, I am always away with her….
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September 09, 2007 at 05:44 PM
(from xkcd by Randall Munroe)
Comments
August 28, 2007 at 03:30 PM
I don't know why. I've been once again obsessed with the sad and sorry life of Severus Snape, and how he lost the only woman he loved, and how his life was effectively ended after she was murdered.
Thinking about it makes me physical ill, and yet I can't help but obsess.
Needless to say, this is mostly due to the disturbing parallels between my life thus far and his sad, pathetic story.
No, no, this is not to say that I was not loved as a child. In some ways, it's like I grew up with three sets of parents. This, of course, has its own pitfalls. But surely there is still an important difference between dysfunction and non-function. Oh yes, I had a dysfunctional childhood, that at least is clear, especially since my mother, of all people, has at last admitted as such.
I wasn't beaten. Much. Definitely not hard. No black eyes or bruises. Maybe red marks and welts from belts and slippers, but definitely nothing to call Child Protective Services over. And while my dad was/is very good at psychological warfare, and was pretty good at leveraging the threat of violence, he never hit my mom.
And while my parents haven't exactly been the epitome of, ah, marital bliss, they somehow managed to stay together, despite the affairs and the arguments and the accusations.
I wasn't poor, either. I wasn't rich, but who really was rich in the 1980's besides a bunch of crooks who are now working for the Bush Administration, selling oil, or selling cocaine and heroin? See, it's not really the absolute amount of wealth that defines one's means. It's the gradient.
So, while I had reasonably new clothes that weren't full of holes, and I even had a car in high school (albeit a car that was 10 years old, had 120,000 miles, didn't go over 80 mph, and had been in a massive accident), it didn't help that I was around people who had new clothes every week, who went on trips to Europe, and who got Lexuses and BMWs when they turned 16. Hilariously, the tactic of sending me, my brother, and my sister to private school ended up teaching us to hate the bourgeoisie, never mind the fact that we are part and parcel of the whole system anyway. We all ended up opting to go to public universities afterwards.
Sure, I grew up hating myself. What self-respecting teenager doesn't have a well-developed sense of self-loathing? Maybe the only fault—though it wasn't an uncommon mistake—was the fact that I had full-blown clinical depression for at least a couple of years, and no one really gave a shit about it.
Let's just say that my mind has been conditioned to see the dark side of everything, and it is probably unavoidable that I see myself as not having a very happy childhood. There were definitely some really good moments, but none of them ever lasted, and a lot of them went very badly indeed.
I did have a girlfriend when I was 16. Nevermind that our courtship was in many ways excruciatingly painful, as she dated a couple of guys and told me all about it before she finally decided to be with me. Maybe that's the happiest I've ever been. I think I was in love. Not that I can confidently say that I know what love is. But it was something.
I sometimes pat myself on my back whenever I think about how she tried to win me back after we broke up. Not that it matters much. She's married now and has a kid, and has at last stopped talking to me, which has always been how I figured it would turn out.
Oh. Why did we break up? She slept with another guy.
Oh, I recognize that most adolescent romances never go anywhere, but surely there are less traumatic ways to end a relationship.
Actually, the older I get, the more bitter I become about it. Not everyone gets their heart completely mutilated at the age of 18, you know.
Which leads me to the thing that I find the most painful, because there is absolutely no one to blame. Even twelve years out, I still wonder, even though it has no relevance at all on real life.
If I hadn't had my heart destroyed first, would I have had a fighting chance with the Woman of My Dreams?
This is where the whole Severus/Lily thing totally turns me inside-out. There is a woman whom I have been friends with for almost 13 years, but I fell in love with her, and I think that screwed everything up. And maybe it wouldn't have gone down that way if I didn't fall into a great big gaping pit of despair that one September evening 12 years ago, when my girlfriend told me she fucked some guy. Maybe I wouldn't have been so needy and desperate and helpless and hopeless and unable to function as a human being. Maybe I could've been a better friend, and there wouldn't've been this awful distance between us that I never dared to cross until it was too fucking late, and even then, maybe it wouldn't've mattered.
I've lost a lot of friends along the way. Well, not lost, not in this hyperconnected world we live in, where I can always IM them or message them through Facebook or Myspace. But they've definitely dropped out of my life. There used to be a time when I would call my oldest friend in the world at least once a month, if not once a week. At least drop him an e-mail, see how he's doing. My aforementioned ex-girlfriend, after we started talking to each other again, about five years after we broke up, used to call me up pretty often too. I last spoke to her maybe two years ago? Though I still hear about her from time to time thanks to the bizarrely provincial nature of the neighborhood I grew up in L.A.
The only people I see now with any regularity are my parents, my brother, and my dog. Oh, I hear from folks from time to time, but its never the same.
The upshot of all of this is that I've never been so alone in my entire life. If I worked in a cubicle, I bet you I could go for weeks on end without really talking to another human being, excepting the transactions over the counter or through a drive-through window. As it is, my job requires me to engage and gain the trust of human beings every single day. It's a wonder I can do it all, considering how completely burnt-out my soul feels sometimes.
Thank God for happy pills, I guess.
But She… She has always been a good friend to me, despite my raging madness, despite my more-than-occasional boorishness, despite my lack of social grace, despite my bitter melancholy, despite the fact that I don't answer the phone or return messages and never check in and say hi and ask how her husband and her kids are doing. Even when she had started dating her now-husband, and I ran away, crushed, defeated, directionless and unmoored, she sent me a card telling me that she missed my friendship. She even went on a road trip with two of our friends to visit me for my birthday that year.
When I had to make rushed plans for a clinical rotation in my fourth year and she was pregnant with her first child, she agreed to let me stay with her, her husband, her brother and his family because I didn't have anywhere else to stay.
Whenever I make my way back to their neighborhood, she and her husband always make sure to meet up with me, however briefly.
The whole falling in love thing screws up a lot of good things, I guess. I think about Severus and his friendship with Lily. Here was a woman who always looked out for him, who treated him with respect, and who had insight into the good things about him.
Someone else brought up this passage and it sticks to me, how Lily could see in Severus what no one else seemed to:
"Really?" whispered Lily.
"Definitely," said Snape, and even with his poorly cut hair and his odd clothes, he struck an oddly impressive figure sprawled in front of her, brimful of confidence in his destiny.
You never get the exact time course of how everything fell apart. Did Severus get drawn to the Dark Arts precisely because he felt that this kind of power would be the only way he could keep James from taking Lily out his life? (Shades of Anakin Skywalker seep in.) That this was the only way he could keep himself safe from James and Sirius? Or was it because besides Lily, only the Death Eaters treated him with respect, recognized him for the powerful, talented wizard that he was? Only the Death Eaters gave him a sense of actually belonging, of being wanted.
Would he have had a chance with Lily if he had decided to eschew the Dark Arts and reject Voldemort?
Like all "what if" questions, there are always at least two equally correct answers, neither of which help with resolving anything.
On one hand, anything that is not expressly forbidden by the Laws of Physics (or, I suppose the Laws of Magick, in this case) is always possible, and in a possibly infinite universe (whether in terms of time or space or both, since the two are interwoven), everything that is possible is actually inevitable given enough time.
On the other hand, clearly we are asking questions about an alternate universe from which we cannot obtain any information from, meaning that, since it didn't happen, then there was no chance of it happening. The arrow of time turns even random chance into Fate. In other words, the answer is maybe, but it doesn't matter now, does it?
I've long stopped asking "what if" questions. Though in moments of weakness, I will slip.
Severus' "what if" haunts me because it is my "what if."
But the more important question is this: if Severus did not fall in love with Lily, if Severus had understood what a good friend she was, and loved her back as a friend and nothing more, would it have gone down completely differently? Would he have striven harder to always have her back, to always support her, even when making decisions like deciding to marry James? Would the draw to the Dark Arts not matter, because he wouldn't be so desparate to keep her in his life, because he would understand that she really cared for him in her fashion, and that this wouldn't necessarily change just because she didn't have romantic feelings for him, and that her friendship was enough of a sense of belonging for him? Would it have mattered if he realized what she saw in him, and even though it didn't mean that she loved him in That Way™, it was still important, such that he would strive to always be someone who lived up to that ideal?
I suppose, in terms of the plot, it wouldn't've, because Lily would've probably still been killed, and Severus would've still stood against Voldemort because of it, and because of his talents for occlumency, he still would've been the best man for the job of infiltrating the Death Eaters.
But maybe he would've been less bitter, knowing that, although he didn't have True Love™, he had a True Friendship.
I don't know. It would just be less sad and pathetic. The worst part was the scene where he found a letter Lily had written to Sirius, and ended up keeping the picture of her and her signature. As someone else brought up somewhere else on the Internet, I mean, c'mon, if they were friends, wouldn't you think he would've had a few letters and pictures of her actually addressed to him? I mean, this is just sad and stalkerish.
(Not that I don't keep everything she has ever written me, but still.)
There has been much written about the fact that Severus follows the long tradition of Byronic heroes. Wikipedia gives this particular definition, which describes Manfred, the prototypical Byronic hero, and which also well describes Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights and Sydney Carton from A Tale of Two Cities:
- conflicting emotions, bipolar tendencies, or moodiness
- self-critical and introspective
- struggles with integrity
- a distaste for social institutions and social norms
- being an exile, an outcast, or an outlaw
- a lack of respect for rank and privilege
- a troubled past
- being cynical, demanding, and/or arrogant
- often self-destructive
- loner, often rejected from society
I suppose contemporary pop culture has Anakin Skywalker to add to the list. And probably Batman, too.
I would also add Fëanor from The Silmarillion and Léon from "The Professional" Maybe even Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII, what with his unassuageable guilt regarding the death of Aeris, his eschewment of human companionship, and his somewhat self-destructive tendencies.
The devastating sense of alienation from the rest of the human race is what haunts me. The rest of the world is mostly uncaring, and uninterested in the hero, but is frequently also hostile, to the point of seeking complete annihilation of the hero, total extirpation from the universe of human concourse, sometimes, even for good reason. (Huh, suddenly Elphaba from "Wicked" also comes to mind. I could probably keep going on and on, in wider and wider tangents.)
And for some damned reason, they always all seem to die violent, unhappy deaths, often alone and unmourned.
I suppose that is one of my greatest fears: to die in a meaningless, anonymous manner, with my entire existence on earth unheralded, forgotten. While, like most people, I fear losing the people who matter to me, I have unfortunately come to the sad, inescapable conclusion that death is unavoidable. As the Flaming Lips sing, "Do you realize/that everyone/you know/someday/will die." It gives me no pleasure to realize this, but I also recognize that there's no point in fearing it.
It seems that in some ways, Time and Fate have been honing me into some sort weapon. Not like some superhero ninja, James Bond-like, Takashi Kovacs-like, Jason Bourne-like weapon, but a moral weapon, meaning that whatever cause I find myself attached to, I will feel that it is my moral obligation to see it to the bitter end. I won't be able to stop it.
In other words, it sometimes feels like the rest of my life has nothing left for it but the preparation for death.
I freely admit that this is not a normal thought for someone who is only 30 years old. In many ways, my life is still beginning. An astute clinician would simply chalk this up to being yet another symptom of my intractable depression. But like the Byronic heroes I've mentioned, there is this sense that a watershed moment has passed. The one possibility in my life—however infinitesimal the probability—that might have given me lasting happiness has passed, and there is no turning back. There is only onward to the black abyss of oblivion.
I do wonder what might've gone on in the mind of a character like Severus Snape. Once Lily's friendship was lost to him, did he just throw himself coldly, calculatingly, into a bid for power as a Death Eater? Did all he have left was his work? Always realizing that he would never get over her, having this empty feeling continuously gnawing at his soul? And no matter what triumphs and victories he might achieve on the Dark Side, nothing he did could give him lasting happiness. And maybe he thought to himself that this was the worst it could possibly get, to live a life devoid of any passion, only this playing of a game, and while the magic might give him ephemeral joy, the emptiness afterwards was always worse.
Maybe he could seek small solace in the fact that at least there was someone like Lily in the world, someone who could see something noble inside him, someone who tried to bring out the best in him, someone who had actually once cared about him. Maybe that little scrap of sentiment was enough, however pathetic it was.
But just when he thought it couldn't possibly get any worse, it did. Not only was Lily destroyed by Voldemort, but he even became an indirect reason for it, when he relayed Trewlaney's prophecy. He might as well have torn out his own soul and cut it up into little pieces to be blown into the wind. How many days, weeks, months, did he feel that cold, emptiness weighing down at the pit of his stomach. How many times did he replay all his memories over and over again, knowing it was all in vain, knowing that nothing he could do could ever make things right again? Awash in this numbing realization, perhaps he floated right through those meetings with the other Death Eaters, not really all there, his heart trapped entirely in his self-misery. He played his part as a spy like a puppet, an empty, hollow shell of a man.
One day maybe, he no longer felt a damned thing. Just utter numbness. He thought nothing of it. He had stopped thinking of either past or future, merely reacting to the present as it unfurled itself.
Until the day he saw her eyes again, borne by her son, and unravelling all the careful defenses he had laid around his heart like the hundreds upon hundreds of foldings of Masamune's swords.
The fits of rage and passion that he is caught up in are not characteristic of a skilled occlumancer. And even worse, faces from his unhappy past are dredged up back to haunt him. Remus Lupin. Sirius Black. And while Harry Potter has his mother's eyes, he also has his father's looks and manner about him.
Alan Rickman does an excellent job with portraying the anguish roiling inside this character, all while trying to hold it in. When I first read the books, I didn't think he really fit the role. But I guess he is a talented actor, and the character came to fit him anyway.
And while he still is cold, calculating, and unflappable, there are significant moments that betray him.
I wonder, was he like Sydney Carton, believing that no further good could possibly come out of his life, and that his eventual destruction would actually be a good outcome? Did he believe that there was no further possible hope for happiness in this life, and that all he could do was see this thing through, and—whether he failed or succeeded—reach the end of it all?
Or was he like Iñigo Montoya, fixated only in achieving vengeance or at least die trying, not even thinking at all of what might happen afterward? Live or die. Same difference. No point in thinking about it until this thing is completed.
Particularly with the way Rickman plays him, Snape does not seem like the kind of guy who has big plans after this whole Lord Voldemort thing blows over, who thinks of maybe buying a small place up in the mountains to get away from it all once in a while, and maybe invest a little in a few bluechips to squirrel something away for retirement. In many ways, he's like a dead guy who just hasn't stopped moving yet. He lives and breathes, but the soul is just evaporated, burnt out, nuked.
Why is it that I know this character all too well?
When you're in excruciating pain and unending torment, the cessation of these sensations can mean one of two things. (1) Whatever it was that was hurting you has stopped, and you can now get up and get on with your life or (2) you are so badly damaged that you can't even feel pain anymore, and it's only a matter of time until the final darkness comes to take you away. When you get right down to it, I suppose I would rather suffer and have some hope for joy, than be numb and unfeeling. The days where I don't feel a goddamn thing are the worst days. When I feel enough to want to weep and feel sorry for myself, at least I know I'm still alive. Otherwise, it's like being trapped in a waking nightmare, unsure of whether you're really there or not, and not giving a damn either way.
Today, for some reason, I had an acute attack of "I want to live" but I'm afraid I've spent way too much time setting myself up for a Byronic fall from grace to call it quits now. For the longest time (for the last nine years at least) I've been convinced that it's all over, and nothing good is ever going to happen to me again, and the best I can hope for is to bask in the reflected glow of other people's triumphs and milestones, and maybe someday I might die a meaningful and heroic death. While this fate may still be true, and I'm not holding my breath to wait for the universe to prove me wrong, I suddenly got the urge to want to jump off of this fasttrack to oblivion.
I want to get over it. Suddenly, I want to cash out and buy into the American Dream. Buy myself a house with at least 15% down in some upscale, rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Make myself a little money, maybe buy myself a nice car. Maybe even find myself a trophy wife. It's not love. It's not kismet. But it would be human. I could actually join the human race. You know, talk to women like I wasn't some kind of freakish outcast, some diseased pariah who had no place in human discourse.
I mean, if E.T. can win the hearts and minds of Americans, why can't I?
And then reality slowly rebounds, springing back at me like a deformed mattress, and I wonder to myself, can I really reverse a decade old death wish now? You know, throw the whole thing in reverse? Somehow make up for lost time and repair the stunting of my wounded soul?
I have never been an optimist, and I'm going to be hard pressed to start being one right now.
But: Why not? Whatever isn't expressly forbidden by the Laws of Physics is always theoretically possible.
To quote Charles Bukowski: "If you don’t have much soul left and you know it, you still got soul."
I'm not dead yet, and with any luck, I won't be any time soon. Here's to hoping.
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August 10, 2007 at 04:32 PM
<meta>Still playing with ecto right now. I can’t figure out the timestamps and it’s kind of driving me nuts. Whatever. I’ll let Mephisto figure it out. But ecto is starting to grow on me. I may very well be shelling out $17.95.</meta>
It’s a Friday night, and I’m feeling extraordinarily anti-social. Part of it is the fact that I have to go to work at 7 am tomorrow and don’t get to go home until something like 11 am on Sunday. Kind of puts a damper on making plans. But, I don’t know. I’ve been really antisocial lately. I worry that this is grossly abnormal and a sign that I’m not well, mentally speaking.
Or maybe it’s how I’ve always been.
(Despite my distaste for “normalcy”, I find myself asking myself the question, “What is normal?”)
My thoughts are pretty damn scattered. While eating lunch today, I had an odd thought. I wonder, is my emotional stunting a permanent but self-limited disorder, or is it a chronic illness that will eventually lead to my death?
For some reason, I was thinking of one of my patients who we diagnosed with gallbladder cancer. This is, invariably, fatal. Surgery is rarely successful, and no chemotherapy ever succeeds in wiping out the tumor. It is actually quite a miserable way to die, but you can probably go on for weeks to months.
I stopped to think of what being the primary care physician for someone with a death sentence is like. Here you are, telling your patient whom you may very well have known for years, knowing that he will die from this particular condition.
On one hand, everyone dies. To paraphrase Chuck Palahniuk (and Tyler Durden), extend the timeline far enough, and the probability of survival eventually drops to zero. And for internal medicine doctors, most of their patients will be older than them. So you know at some point it’s going to happen.
On the other hand, most of your patients aren’t going to die in weeks to months, either, in horrible discomfort. (One of the most unbearable symptoms of gallbladder cancer is actually the incuraable itching.)
But, as St. Andrew is supposed to have said, ”Dum spiro, spero.” While I breathe, I hope. If you’re alive, that’s something.
(Immediately, the question that pops into my mind is: is it enough to just be alive? I think of all the folks we’ve hooked up to ventilators, and just left there to literally rot for years on end, because their families still hope for recovery.)
But back to my ruminations: permanent but self-limited, or progressive and intractable?
And example of the former would be someone who was in a horrible car wreck, crushing their legs, and requiring amputation. This person will be permanently disabled but he/she is otherwise healthy, and can continue to lead a fulfilling life, minus certain experiences that require having legs. I mean, with prosthetics, it’s possible that this person could actually walk at some point, but clearly it’s not a perfect substitute.
This is in contrast to the latter. I guess the most illustrative examples are chronic diseases that arise in childhood or young adulthood. Cystic fibrosis. Inflammatory bowel disease. Systemic lupus erythematosus. Any disease that requires organ transplant. None of these are necessarily fatal, but they can certainly progress to the point where complications can kill you. You won’t be able to live a “normal” life, but that doesn’t mean you have to be limited in any way. Statistically speaking, you will probably die earlier than if you didn’t have a disease, but it’s certainly not the sentence of impending death that a diagnosis of inoperable cancer is.
But, either way you look at it, you have to deal with the issue all your life, whether it’s the permanent-but-self-limited problem, or whether it’s the progressive/intractable problem. So maybe it doesn’t matter (except that if it’s the latter, I should probably seek some sort of treatment.)
It’s only in very recent times that depression has been regarded as an actual illness, similar to the diseases I mentioned above. Unless you’ve actually dealt with someone with depression, or are depressed yourself, I think it’s difficult to appreciate the difference between ordinary sadness and grief that we all experience, and the crippling mental illness that is depression.
I’m not sure how long I’ve lived with it—certainly at least since high school, though it’s possible that I’ve had problems with it even before then. But whatever the case, it never got so severe until four years ago, where I could no longer function as a human being. That’s the point I knew that I had seek help.
For the longest time in my life, I had this penchant for looking back. For wondering “what if?” and having to deal with the fact that whatever it was never came to be. This was the kind of thought that would typically send me into a downward spiral.
This far into the game we know as life, I find asking that question is a lot more pointless. I am who I am, and as I look back at the convoluted paths I’ve taken to get where I am, it’s hard to be willing to second-guess myself. I have, more or less, gotten to where I have intended to go. Whether or not this was a good idea in the first place, or whether my motivations for getting here were reasonable, are completely separate questions which may well need to be answered at some point, but, well, here I am.
The older I get, the less point there seems to be in asking “What if?”
The other realization with getting older is the fact that time is finite. Now, I could very well live for several more decades, or I might get hit by a bus tomorrow. No one ever knows. But for some reason, I’ve started thinking about the fact that no matter what, I will never have enough time to do everything that I want to do in my life.
I’m going to have to triage my goals. List my priorities. Recognize the aspirations that are probably never going to happen. Concentrate on the things that are possible.
Prioritizing things has never been my strong suit. That’s the awesome thing about being young. You never stop to think about the fact that this is all going to end someday.
Which comes down to the thing that I’ve been pondering lately: the increasing likelihood that I will be permanently alone and unloved.
If I were “normal”, this would not even be a consideration. I feel like most normal people have a much easier time with developing relationships (platonic or otherwise.) Falling in love is a quintessential part of being human.
Unfortunately, I feel like I’ve completely lost my ability to do this. To leave myself vulnerable. To be willing to give without counting the cost. Every interaction I have is guarded. Defense mechanisms and rationalizations abound.
Everything I do seems guaranteed to push people away from me.
It increasingly seems like some kind of chicken-and-egg problem. To be loved, you must give love. But it’s hard to love when you aren’t loved. More to the point, being depressed makes it hard to be loved, and to love. But not experiencing love probably contributes to depression.
I don’t know. Maybe the above is not true. Maybe if I can believe that this is all transient and I just need to get better, and that I’m not going to die from this (although severe depression really does seem to have a high mortality rate) Easier said than done.
But then again, I’ve never been the most patient person in the world, which is remarkable, considering what I’ve been through to get to where I am. But maybe that’s it. I’ve used up what little patience I have.
Dum spiro, spero. I really have to remember that more often.
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May 17, 2007 at 04:43 AM
The last time my sister graduated, I was seriously in love with S. While in the back of my head I suppose I always knew it wasn’t going to work, I had been doing a good job ignoring that particular fact. Naturally, when I got back to Chicago, everything went to hell, and I went into a patented downward spiral.
This is what you get for believing in fairy tales, and trying to fly by wishing.
So four years (!?) have passed, and I am perhaps much more cautious and much more jaded. I have no illusions at this point. But strangely, I am more hopeful. For what, I don’t know. The horizons are pretty damn wide-open, and while I’m starting to get used to the idea of eternal loneliness, there are still a few shattered fragments of my heart that refuse to die.
Dum spiro, spero. There is still hope while I breathe.
I tell you, my life has been divided up in four year blocks for so long, I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself after finishing residency. Once again, the trajectory of my life remains to be determined. Am I going to stay in San Diego? Will I finally end up in L.A. once and for all? Will I actually make it back to the Bay Area, even if it’s only for a year or two? Or will I end up somewhere completely unexpected? Chi-town? NYC? Alaska? Hawai’i? New Mexico? Canada? Old Mexico? Buenos Aires? Reykjavik? Taipei? Bangkok? Katmandu? Who knows?
I can imagine a roulette wheel spinning round and round somewhere. Where do I lay down my chips?
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