A Whole Week Un-depressed

i can't believe it!  thank the gods for Abilify!  after 2 years, what a relief!

happy birthday keith

today would have been my kid brother's 66th birthday; he died at 33.  it still hurts not be able to tease him about his balding, or being a grandfather, or any of the other signs of old age.  i still miss him.

and, in the sometimes dreary life-goes-on motif-- today is the 3rd day in a row in which, though hardly happy, i'm not actively depressed.  keith would be happy for that.....

O, Lucky Me!

my local supermarket is bringing back that irritating 'benefit' of the 1950s--stamps you are given with a certain amount of money spent, stamps which will go, as i recall, either to one specific item or to one of a series of items.  Anyway, Shaw's is giving customers stamps toward some sort of dinnerware set. i have yet to accept a single stamp; it's too complicated and my dishes are ancient melmac which never breaks so why do i need a perky new set?

at the same supermarket, you can also buy your monthly transit set, something i do use, so today i dropped by to get my october pass.  as i was about to recycle my receipt,  i glanced at the bottom of it.

surrounded by asterisk stars was a lovely announcement, which read as follows:


****************************************
   Congratulations!
You have earned    0
Racheal Ray Dinnerware Stamps
****************************************

 i wonder when i'll have time to redeem them, and exactly what i'll get for that many?

Reflecting on my Reflection

interesting experience tonight about part of the way my depression works. as most of my friends, cyber and otherwise know, i've  been in the midst of a nasty depression for around 2 years.  its severity ranges from feeling almost not awful to feeling deadly awful--and always, always sleepy [though it hasn't helped my insomnia go away]. anyway tonight i was waiting for the elevator to the T [subway or metro to you non-boston types], feeling pretty much down but okay, and watching the glass door to see when the elevator came.  you know how sometimes if you see your reflection when you're not thinking about it, there can be the tiniest fraction of a second when you see it not as you but someone else in front of you? well, that happened, and although feeling utterly homely and dowdy is pretty much a constant these days, the woman in the glass struck me as someone strong, attractive, and definitely with an air of 'style' that was her own and quite striking.

when i realized 'she' was myself and kept on watching her, she kept that air; it amused and pleased me that, totally polyestered as i was, i thought i looked great,  and grandly self confident.  this is an alien feeling these days: actually the idea that i looked attractive and strong has been alien for decades.  at the same time, i felt the core of the depression deeply; when it's bad it always feels like a very thick long gray pipe going from the top of my head to the bottom of my torso.  but here, it felt like my soul had divided itself, each part highlighting the other.  the proud ego pulled me ahead, and at one point i actually smiled. but the smile itself called attention to the stubborn, hateful gray pipe.  they didn't clash with each other; each claimed its place and stayed there.  then i got to my destination and my work took over.  i taught my class a bit over-intensely, and got way off topic, but in what i think, and my students clearly thought, was a useful way.

back to the T, and the pipe in my chest was announcing itself pretty clearly and pushing fear toward my heart and skin. the striking woman with the odd but effective style had morphed back into a tired and defeated frump.

but i'm interested in that early moment at the window.  depression is always very physical for me, but this time it physicality seemed divorced, briefly, from my other feelings.  does anyone reading this experience depression this way?  As i am tapering off one antidepressant to try another, i'm curious about the dynamics of the condition.  how much is an illness, helped by medication, and  how much a pure product of mind or soul?  i suppose pragmatically it hardly matters.  the antidepressant i'd taken for decades had helped it stay away, but its effect wore off;  the new ones did their best to take up the slack, but gave up pretty quickly.  now, bachelor number 3, it's your turn.  it would be nice to spend an entire day not envying the dead.

but i do wonder if the incongruously elegant lady in the elevator door was trying to tell me something.

NCIS and the departure of Ziva the Diva

NICS is one of those steady, reliable, and somehow, in spite of all the decomposed bodies cluttering our screen, comfortable TV shows, and when a major figure leaves, it's a shock.  So, since we know Cote de Pablo, as the beautiful, brilliant Israeli-born agent  Ziva is leaving the show, the big question for the upcoming early season is, what happens to Ziva?  They really can't kill her off: both her predecessor in the agency and the agency's female boss have both been murdered over the years: the show relies on a lot of repetition, but that would be serious overkill.  The producers are promising that there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth among the audience:  a 'heart-wrenching farewell' that will create 'a moment in TV history.'  My theory has been that she will return to Israel to fight the good fight there,  in the wake of her father's murder.  that would make sense, but would hardly be as monumental as the PR sounds.  Further, it wouldn't be a great resolution to the seven-year coy courtship between Ziva and Tony.

My guess, then, is death--not by murder but by nature.  Ziva will present with an incurable illness, and go back home to die. That would indeed be heart-wrenching, and provide a chance for some fine acting, not only for de Pablo but for Michael Wetherly as the clownish Tony, whose attraction towards Ziva has grown from sexist silliness to real love over the years.

But this guess depends much on the reasons for de Pablo's departure, about which both she and the network have remained determinedly silent.  If there were any chance she might return to the show, after, say, a year or two of trying to break into film,  they would surely dump Ziva in a recyclable fashion.  Death by illness would represent a moment of truthfulness in a show that, elegantly as it's done, is basic cops-and-robbers.   It would add potential interest for the rest of the cast, having to play out an unexpected form of grief.  and would certainly provide interest in the character of Tony, who has already matured a bit in the past few seasons, and whose frat-boy affect would have to change in the midst of shattering loss.  Should be interesting.

The Pretty Purple Farmhouse....

okay, every industry has its abbreviated language: i teach 'euro lit' and my colleague teaches 'poly sci'; we all question the availability of 'wyfi' without blinking. so why should anyone's abbreviations sound funny?  except when my lovely therapist, knowing i'm in a bad slump in my depression, kindly puts in calls to her psychopharmacology colleagues so i can get more effective meds. "so if you get a call from psychopharm,' she tells my machine,  'that's what it'll be about.'' and indeed she has managed to get me an appointment for tomorrow morning. but of course it's my ear that takes in her phone message, so tomorrow i go to........psycho-farm! the image has me giggling almost out of my depression.  of course, my mind could pick up orwellian implications, but thankfully it doesn't, and tomorrow i shall frolic with the lambs and goats and sweet-faced cows, and watch the does eat oats and mares eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.....so maybe there's hope after all..............

A Friend's Memory of the March 50 Years Ago

An  eloquent piece by my old friend Elliot Linzer about his part in the original MLK march on Washington [posted with his  permission]

March on Washington, Fifty Years Later

For many weeks I have been thinking about what I wanted to write today. After seeing much the coverage in the media of both the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and of last Saturday's March, I think that the less I say now the better. You have all been reading and seeing too many words and too many photographs.

As most of you know, I served as a volunteer on the national staff of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, under Bayard Rustin, during the summer of 1963. I spent every day for six weeks working in the national office. At one point, a few years ago, I thought that I may be the last survivor of the national staff of the March. Fortunately, I am not.

It is no surprise to see that almost all the media is saying that this is the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream Speech,” ignoring the complete political and organizational context of that speech and that event. Rep. John Lewis is the only one of the speakers at the podium that day still living. While I see frequent references to Lewis being pressured to change the text of his speech, most of these accounts exaggerate the changes he made and extent of the of the differences. Lewis made two minimal changes to his speech and the leadership of the civil rights coalition sponsoring the March were largely unified behind him. I should know: I was the person who ran the mimeograph machine printing up Lewis's speech several days before the March. I was one of the first people to read it.

While Lewis's picture is seen often now, and his name appears in almost all the current accounts of the March, I have not seen other names that I had expected to see, specifically A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. I knew Rustin from the War Resisters League and Liberation magazine for about two years before the March. Others on the March staff, including, Rachelle Horowitz, Tom Kahn, Penn Kemble, Peter Graham, I knew from the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL). Norman and Velma Hill I knew from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

The Hills, Horowitz and Eleanor Holmes Norton (who I did not know before the March) are very much still alive. Have you seen any interviews with them recently? I certainly have not. This is especially odd in view of Norton now being the District of Columbia's nonvoting representative in Congress.

Very few of the articles I've seen lately mention any of the original demands of the March, especially the economic demands. Do you remember what the very first demand was? It was for a minimum wage of $2 per hour. The March on Washington really was for jobs and freedom, not just for procedural rights. While the right to vote was certainly important, and an end to discrimination in public accommodations and education was important, they were subservient to the demands for economic equality. All the civil rights leadership agreed on that.

I started this with “the less I say now the better,” so I'll stop now.

I'm looking forward to seeing your comments.

Elliot Linzer

Elliot Linzer commented on a link you shared.  ---a p.s. from elliot.... Elliot wrote: "I am happy to make a correction to what I wrote. Eleanor Holmes Norton was interviewed several times, including on MSNBC. Rachelle Horowitz was on a CNN documentary, and I think that Norman Hill was interviewed somewhere, at least that's what I've been told. The reference to the $2 minimum wage demand in 1963 was repeated in a story on NY1 (local Time-Warner all news cable channel) not about the March, but one on the one-day strike of fast food workers, demanding a $15/ hour wage. Two dollars in 1963 is the equivalent of $15 dollars today. I felt some satisfaction seeing that story."

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