In relationship

(A sidenote: The band at my church is rehearsing this praise song, I think it's called "I Can Only Imagine." I love this song; it's one of the most lovely modern praise songs I've heard in a while.)

I've been realizing (in a bit of a "duh" moment) that I'm having such a hard time understanding what God is doing because I'm not really maintaining my relationship with Him these days. It's hard to feel like you know and "get" someone when you're not talking to them, not hanging out, not calling or writing.

That's all in very human relational terms, but that's the easiest way for me to compare and understand it. When I haven't talked to my friends in a while or spent time with them, there's always this little sense of distance, of not really knowing what's going on with them or what they're thinking about. Of course, it tends to clear up pretty quickly the next time we're together and talking - but that's also without any problem or issue or confusion arising in our relationship. When that happens, and you have that distance, things are harder to repair, harder to restore. You can stay feeling out of touch, out of sync, or just really upset and angry for a much longer time, and there's always that danger that the relationship won't get back to rights.

In another relationship analogy, I've been so frustrated with these guys I meet whose words say, "I'm interested, you're cool," but whose actions (or lack thereof) clearly say, "You're not worth my effort." But I've been doing that to God. Intellectually, verbally, I can talk about Him and how important He is and how amazing. But I won't go out to meet Him, I won't call to talk - or if I do, I'm always calling to complain about how much my life sucks and tell Him why He made me kind of upset. It makes me realize that the Lord has infinitely more relationship patience than I do; I'd have long since written me off as kind of an unreliable loser/user.

God's not my friend or my boyfriend. But I think I need to ask myself a little more often: how would I expect to treat that kind of person in a relationship? And compared to that, how am I treating God? If it's not at least the kind of relationship I'm maintaining with my friends - which is setting kind of a low bar; I'm not always the greatest friend - but if it's not at least there, then something is awry.

Resolution

My landlord, my roommate and I just came to an agreement about the early termination of our current housing arrangements. I am glad for both of us, because this situation was uncomfortable and highly unpleasant for both her and me, and it is a blessing for both of us to be released to better things.

I still don't know if I passed or failed my test ... but I appreciate the Lord's mercy in not making me go through it any longer.

The weight complex

(It's a 2-for-1 bonus day! That's what happens when I get backed up with blogging.)

I often wonder how people would describe my physique - full-figured? chubby? overweight? fat? I don't really have any very good sense of how I look compared to other people around me or how I look in other people's eyes. When I check myself out in the mirror, I see some lumpy pockets that I'd like to be rid of, and I wish for the re-emergence of my collarbone; but I also pretty frequently look at myself clothed and naked and think, "That's pretty darn hot" or, "I look so cute today!" Bumps and lumps gained over the years notwithstanding, I still find myself very attractive.

But I do often think about losing some weight. To get to wear all the clothes I want to wear right now would be about 30 pounds; to get to my ultimate fighting weight for my age and body type would be about twice that. Those numbers usually sound daunting enough to me, given what I expect would be my difficulty in maintaining the lifestyle regimen required to achieve them; but on top of all that, I think I'd have an even bigger difficulty with what would happen should I ever achieve them. What's the net result if you drop the weight but gain a giant chip on your shoulder?

Because I assure you, I'd have one. The first time someone said to me after I lost the weight, "Oh, you look so great!" the response in my head (and maybe aloud) would be, "Oh, did I look so awful before?" And the first time I got asked out by a guy who had known me all along but never said anything to me until I dropped a few dress sizes, I'd be thinking, "Oh, I see - now I'm worth your time and energy." It would be mostly insecure, rude and ridiculous - but not entirely. I can't guarantee that once I get svelte I'll always stay that way, and if people's interest in me as a likable, lovable person is in any significant part dependent on my measurements, I do have quite an issue with that. I get really frustrated with thinking that I have to be just so - physically, emotionally - in order to be socially acceptable.

Anyway, all this is to say that I have developed an extreme resistance to losing weight, as a kind of "screw you" to social expectations. It's not especially productive for me, however - I have my own health and aesthetic reasons for wanting to be more trim, and I've been letting all that social pressure still run my life, even if it runs it in the other direction from what is typical. I am also inherently lazy, and I don't like do any exercise that requires too much out-of-the way effort or isn't fun for me. So I was inspired by a friend to try a new way of exercising: walking for transportation.

I was on this kick for a little while a couple years ago, and I'm coming back to try it again. The great thing about walking for transportation is that I can take the focus off of my weight complex and put it on the necessity of getting from A to B. This is where living off of the train line has its advantages: since it usually takes me 45-60 minutes to get to and from work anyway, an hour-long walk doesn't seem like such a big difference in efficiency, and then I get a health benefit as a bonus. I'm not walking to work, because that leaves me stinky without adequate washing facilities at my office; but on the way home, who cares if I'm stinky except me? I started on Wednesday, and so far, so good ... the walk home is about 2.5-3 miles, which is an impressive daily walk for me, anyway. And on the weekends, I'm trying to make sure that I walk to and/or from the subway station when I'm going out and about, which gets me just under 1.5 miles each way.

I'm primarily hoping for (or only trying to think about) the health-related results: stress reduction, better sleep, improved cardiovascular fitness, a little muscle conditioning. I'm trying not to set any weight-loss expectations; if something happens, I get to be pleasantly surprised, but if nothing happens, I'm trying to avoid being disappointed and to focus on the positives that are coming out of it. I don't know if all these Jedi mind-tricks will work, but we'll see how I feel in a month or so (i.e., as we approach the end of Project Reunion).

So now, I'm off to wash and walk down to the subway with a big bag of disposable electronics. A happy Saturday to all!

Everything I learned about this weekend I learned from the Boston Metro

I love the Boston Metro (and to a lesser extent, it's now-defunct competitor, Boston NOW). These little mini-papers, ideal for reading on public transportation, are my primary source of news at this point, besides the beloved Colbert Report; some may call them news-lite, since it's at least half made up of stories straight off of the AP newswire, but I don't care, because it takes me at least an hour and a half sitting to read through the Boston Globe, and I only had that kind of time when I was working as an admin assistant and not really doing anything of substance for the first couple hours of my workday.

The Metro has international distribution; my first sighting of it was actually in Paris several years ago. I know here in the States it's distributed in Boston, Philly and New York. In addition to whatever the national and international news may be, they have a good bit of local content, and so I can also keep posted on events happening here in Boston to which I would otherwise be completely oblivious. Granted, most of the time I just ponder all the cool bands coming while knowing that I'm not quite cool enough to go see them, or look longingly at the theater and dance reviews, but every so often I catch something that it's entirely likely I may go see or take advantage of when next I decide to be socially plugged in.

This is what the Metro taught me yesterday:

• Farewell to clocks: That's right; it may finally be time for my alarm clock to move on to a better place - a recycling center! According to this article, Boston is offering electronic waste recycling today at UMass-Boston from 9AM to 2PM. I can take the 5 old cell phones and PDAs, the long-out-of-use DSL modem, the old DVD player that no longer works, and a couple other items into the city for environmentally friendly disposal. Mind you, though, I'm actually not sure I can take my clock - the list of acceptable materials on the City of Boston website says no to "household appliances." I can't tell if a clock rises to the level of a household appliance; I'm taking it down anyway, in the hopes that I can sneak it in.
• I'm too sexy for your movie house: Unless that movie house is the Somerville or Coolidge Corner Theaters. The Independent Film Festival of Boston is taking place this weekend (or more accurately, since Wednesday), and I was enticed by the possibility of seeing Famke Janssen in real life at the screening of her movie. It's entirely possible that there's no way I'm still getting tickets to this evening's showing, but I'm going to give it a whirl anyway.

In other news, Harold & Kumar Escape Guantanamo Bay opened yesterday, and Neil Patrick Harris will be riding a unicorn. (Don't judge me because I kind of want to see it; you've had those movies, too.)

There are other things going on this weekend, most notably good service stuff like the work Rebuilding Together Boston is doing today at Greenwood Memorial UMC in Dorchester. Unfortunately, I'm still at home blogging at 11AM instead of swinging a hammer ...

Project Reunion

And so it begins:

I discovered 5 years ago that I actually really dig class reunions. After sneaking into my 5-year college event at the last minute so that I could hang out with my friends who were in town, I found myself having a really good time catching up with all these folks I hadn't seen in ages; plus, Very Prestigious Local University knows how to throw events in style, and they always feed me well. I liked it so much that it convinced me to attend my 10-year high school event the year after, which I also thoroughly enjoyed. So when the 10-year college event announcements started popping up last year, I had no doubt that I would attend.

And so today on an internet break at work, I decided to look at the registration form for the reunion. I checked out the prices - a little expensive, but I figure since I didn't really pay for the last one, I could afford to pay for this one. And then I was looking at all these little boxes next to the prices, and I realized that they were for putting down the number of attendees. That's when it hit me - I'm going to be attending my 10-year reunion childless, spouseless, and at present, dateless. I wasn't quite sure if I had a strong enough sense of myself to spend an entire weekend alone while hobnobbing with the spouses and families of my peers.

Thus was born Project Reunion, the campaign to get me a date for my reunion event. I don't make enough money to go The Wedding Date route and hire a man for the weekend, and I don't think I'm quite that desperate. (We'll just be glad that my relative poverty keeps me from being able to find out.) If push comes to shove, my lovely former roommate has volunteered to be my spouse for a limited time (it's MA, so you can do those things - and because we're both residents of the Commonwealth, we can even get divorced later if need be). Sadly, she said she won't put out even though I'm going to be paying for her ... but there's an open bar, so I'm betting she'll be open to persuasion after a few hours.

Of course, I'm not really inclined that way either, so we both decided it'd be better to find a guy for me to go with. But who? My dating prospects have been few and far between, and as I look at the roster of my male friends, I'm not sure I can identify the right man for the job. (If any of my male friends are reading this and want to dispute that, feel free!) So, I'm looking for a strategy that I can put in motion over the next month, to have me a date well-secured by the end of May. Any suggestions from my readers?

Failed?

Happy Tax Day to all! Hope you filed in time. I did, just barely, and let me tell you what a joy it is to know that the state and federal governments will retain their stranglehold on my finances for the next several months at least. If anyone ever tells you not to worry and that being an independent contractor is no biggie, don't believe them.

1. Do your homework, and make sure that it's legal for the person to whom you will be providing services to treat you as a contractor. (If they have control over your hours and how and when you choose to get your work accomplished beyond setting key deadlines, then it is not legal; whether full-time or part-time, you are acting as their employee and they need to pay and protect you as such.)
2. Figure out how much you need in take-home pay to live on, and then make sure you are being paid at least one and half times that amount; the extra half will go to your tax liabilities (and your health or other insurance).
3. Pay those liabilities quarterly, and pay them all by the end of the calendar year; underpayment penalties suck.

And if you're not comfortable with the arrangement or don't feel that you understand being an independent contractor well enough, don't let anyone bully you into accepting it just because they don't think you have any reason to be uncomfortable ... I let people do that to me, and I'm still paying for it two years later, and I'm still pissed off about it because I was right and I should have fought for what I needed as a worker.

However, the failure in question is not my failure to handle my taxes appropriately. Instead, it has to do with the test that God may have been laying out for me, which I think I totally boffed.

About two weeks ago, I'd reached a new and exciting level of depression not experienced at that intensity in many years. (When you start considering slitting your wrists and letting someone find you dead as a form of revenge, you know something's gone horribly awry with your coping mechanisms.) The primary factor in this new state has been my new housing situation, which was the 100-pound straw that broke the camel's back of my stress management. My roommate and I are not a good match, and it makes home dreadfully uncomfortable for me and totally messes with my place of peace, I didn't know how to handle it at all. My therapist was telling me to engage, be open about how I felt, work it out by talking through it despite my natural preference for non-verbal communication. I felt like God was also telling me that I needed to come up with a new way to handle this conflict, because my current ways of dealing with it were not helping the situation. I think both God and my therapist are going to be very disappointed in me.

I spent a couple of days trying to figure out how to engage and work it out, and then I chose an alternate route - disengage as completely as possible. I don't really talk to my roommate anymore, I avoid being in the common areas with her as little as possible ... and if I can, I prefer not to be at home while she's here and awake. It's a little tricky to manage, but my work and events schedule helps out tremendously; on the weekends, it's a little more dicey, but manageable. I do think it has reduced what little cooking I was starting to do to almost non-existent, but it's not like I was that much of a cook to begin with. I like foods that require minimal prep time before consumption.

Perhaps some would argue that this was the immature, cowardly way out. They might be right. I guess I felt like I was faced with a choice: keep trying to deal with this problem and spend the rest of a month crying, or pick the option that gave me at least space, if not peace. Others might argue that those options don't really factor in the power of the Lord to help me through this, and that if I had more faith who knows what I might have discovered about how this would work out. They might also be right; I certainly feel like, if I had been a better Christian and a better person, I would have been able to find the truly positive, healing resolution. Unfortunately, I'm just me ... and try as I might to pray while I was crying, I guess I wasn't doing it right, because no help seemed to come. A friend today told me I was wise to know my limits and not try to do more than I'm able. I'd like to believe her, and not have to feel guilty for not being whatever it is I feel like I ought to have been.

This has been a real faith trial for me, in a year or more of real faith trials. I really feel like I need the Lord to show or give me a bit more to get through this, because I don't have any idea where He is or what He's asking me or how on earth He expects me to get through all of this stuff in one piece. I might be overly demanding, since He's the Lord of the universe and has already given me everything good that ever happened to me ... but He keeps asking me to hold on to things that I can't see or feel and that are totally intangible in my life, and I know I'm part spirit but I'm also part physical matter and I'm tired and I'm lonely and I'm sensory and I feel like He doesn't even care about that. And then it all makes me ask what or why I bother believing - and that scares the crap out of me, because even though I'm having a pretty rough time with God these days, without Him, what's the point?

Small change vs. systemic change

I'm at a socially responsible design conference today called Systems for Inclusion, and we're in the midst of the second panel of the day. The speakers have been good and interesting, and they're all doing some great work. An attendee (and member of the organizing committee) sitting behind me made a striking comment, though: despite being a conference supposedly focused on the interaction of design with broader systems (that are currently mostly exclusive), we don't really have anyone talking about those systems or what could or should be done to change them. The policy people, the finance people, the politicians are almost totally absent; the interventions are mostly small scale.

I don't dismiss or denigrate the small scale, local interventions; in fact, I believe that local action is always the place where the rubber meets the road as far as just or unjust effects. But to focus almost exclusively on the local is to ignore that there are larger influences and forces that have enormous impact on the local and what can happen there. At some point, some people do have to take on the systemic change at the systems level. It's a huge problem, and generally too big for one person, but we have to discuss what needs to happen and mobilize to do it.

Of course, this is an ongoing tension and a dynamic balance. I never know where I sit on the spectrum myself; I've been a huge proponent of focusing on the local this last year or so. I guess I'm being pulled back in the other direction a little bit by this conference.

"Buck up, little camper!"

I will not, thank you very much.

So I think it's official as of Monday that I'm in a pretty severe depression. The old standards have returned - the sense of being completely overwhelmed, the morning and evening crying, the gentle but steady withdrawal from social contact. The return of suicidal ideation is a bit of a surprise; I thought I'd kind of dismissed that aspect of the whole thing given that I was never going to work up the courage to go through with it, but perhaps that was only a temporary deterrent for a milder sort of depression. The part that feels very, very new is the constant sense of anger. There's typically an aspect of my depression that includes a sort of bitterness, but this is somewhat different ... it's like there's this constant underlying potential for me to just flame up with rage. Eventually, once I've raged and been rebuked for it, I'll turn it back inward on myself as usual, but there remains a lingering feeling of potentially hating everyone a little bit, all the time. I'm curious as to the origins of that one; I'd talk about it with my therapist, but I'm definitely angry at her.

It's so interesting watching myself go back into this again. The part of me that observes me is diligently studying the progression and trying to understand the stages better; she's been aware of this slow descent for a while, but was wondering if it'd plateau rather than take the deep dive. She's the curious one, and the one who probably handles most of the rest of my life so that the angry, weepy, crazy me only makes an occasional appearance instead of a constant freakshow. Angry Me is frequently irritated with Observing Me for the constant pressure to conform to social norms and be nice to people around me; on the other hand, Angry does appreciate that Observing holds down the job necessary to keep us housed, fed, clothed, and out of debt. Thanks, O.

A big question, of course: do I keep blogging? The one thing anyone who's ever been depressed knows about depression is that no one really wants to hear about it; it gets old quick, and no one can ever figure out why you just won't adopt a positive outlook. Heck, I'm depressed and I'd even get a little tired of reading a depression blog. I'm sure I'd get tired of writing one. I'm already tired, and I'm hardly through this entry. Of course, it is quarter to 11PM after a long week.

I'm almost surprised to be writing this today because yesterday was such a good day. But I guess I forgot that's another aspect of this whole thing; you can totally count the good days and the bad days, and they switch off (or switch right in the middle) without warning. This week, it does seem that my likelihood of a good day is inversely proportional to the amount of contact I have with my roommate. I suspect that's going to be a recurring theme ... in combination with the stress of my job these days, that means I've got a good 3 months of this to go, at least, before I can catch a break. Let the fun begin!

The key to depression avoidance

Do not think about what is going on in your life, ever; it only ends in tears. When stuck on public transportation and alone with your thoughts, quickly find something else to do, like reading the paper or playing a video game on your phone. You can also write a wry blog entry about the situation, but be forewarned: sometimes what starts out as a kind of joke ends up as a real reflection on the problem. If at any time you find your wit turning into actual examination, close your blog entry hastily and start playing Solitaire at once. DO NOT begin thinking under any circumstances.