Not getting depressed, again

The bloody Internet keeps eating my brain. For the past couple evenings I have opened up my computer with the intention to post things here, but I think, well, I'll just browse a little first and see what's going on, and then the next thing I know I'm out of time or I can't remember what I was going to say. Has anybody figured out some way to prevent having your brain eaten like this when you browse? I've tried lots of garlic and cayenne, but they don't seem to help.

Yesterday and today have perhaps been the beginning of spring-like weather around here. It has been 50-ish with warm sunshine, and a nice breeze that doesn't make you chilly as long as you've got a jacket on. But strangely, I'm reacting to this in a very mixed way. I'm glad that it's not quite so cold. But driving along the Hudson River on my way to work this morning, everything was looking naked without its snow cover, and all mushy, and I didn't feel ready for it. Imagining things getting greener was worse. It's not time for that yet, in my head. I don't need it to look January-white, but the early-March dirty half-melted snow all over everything was just about right.

This is as unusual for me as it is for most people. Usually I am overjoyed at every sign of spring. That itself may be part of what's getting to me: if it's spring, I should be excited, but I'm too stressed to be excited, and I don't want spring to leave me behind, so it should wait. If it were warmer, that should be relaxing, but I can't relax, so I'd prefer that the weather stay cool. I would feel all exposed in spring clothes -- I want to hide inside my boots and layers and leather jacket. Spring is for spring cleaning and starting gardens and spending time outdoors and getting back to 99 different projects with the house and yard, and I don't feel ready for any of that.

I know enough by now to know, these reactions are signals I need to keep an eye on. I could get depressed right about now. I've been feeling it particularly since they told us about the increase in caseloads at work last week. I have been working really hard to get on top of the work I've been doing, and I've been getting somewhere. I was just getting to the point where things might have just gone smoothly for a while, and I might have been able to relax a little at work. But now it's just going to keep getting harder, for the forseeable future. I'm exhausted just thinking about it. And everything outside of work feels overwhelming too. I was juggling everything and feeling good about it... but as of this most recent spike in the stress level, it seems that at least part of my brain has decided it is no longer obliged to maintain a positive attitude about anything at all.

I hate being depressed. I have had enough of it to last a lifetime. It feels ironic that what I need to do is to kick myself into even higher gear, to make sure that the exercise and the eating right and the getting enough sleep all make it into the schedule on top of everything else (because of course those things are the first to go). But I will do it, and whatever else I need to do to stay out of the hole. I'm still at the point now where I have a choice about whether I keep going down or not. I have learned from experience that taking care of myself at this point can break the spiral, so that's what I need to do.

This all looks so overwrought and teenagerish when I step back from it. This is not what it's like to be in my head all the time, mostly I'm just doing what I'm doing. But even when it's subtle, depression is not something I want to mess with. So I am resisting the urge to change my mind and not publish this. Even though I probably can "just deal with it" in my own head this time, I would rather live in a world where people feel able to talk about mental health more.

Today on my lunch break I took a walk outside. There is a highway that separates downtown Albany from the Hudson, but there's a footbridge that goes over the highway to a park on the near bank of the river. I went over the bridge, and stood for a while looking at the water, thinking about how I didn't want spring yet, but the sun was on my back. After a while, I started to think how maybe I could imagine, if the sun were a little warmer, and there were soft green grass here, I might lie down on the grass and rest. OK, I guess I could be ready for that.

An appropriate Saturday

1. Slept late.

2. It's gorgeous out.

3. We just got new pots and pans. They do not have non-stick coatings. The old pots and pans with the scratched-up coming-off-in-the-food non-stick coatings are going in the garbage now.

4. We have got the ingredients on hand to attempt to make this cheesecake for the first time. M & R had it at a party recently and said it was AWESOME.

5. A cutie is coming to visit us tonight, so her folks can get an undisturbed night's sleep for once. (And so we get to play with her!)

Also, strangely enough, tomorrow is Easter already. I'm having trouble caring about coloring eggs, and I don't even want chocolate. Dad is coming over and making a ham, and that's fine. Beyond that, I think I'll go outside and enjoy the sun and find some crocuses somewhere, and ignore the rest.

bits & pieces

Lots happening this week. The Powers That Be decided that the program I work for needs to increase caseloads, fast -- within 90 days I will have 20 or 21 cases instead of the 12 I currently have. Mind you, "cases" are families, not individuals... Yikes. This is gonna be interesting.

Found a cool thing: Seed Wiki will host a wiki for you if, like me, you are geeky enough to know what to do with one but not geeky enough to know how to host your own. At our house we're considering going over to using a wiki to keep track of household business. Because we are starting to think in hypertext. Uh oh.

Best for last: yesterday was TEN YEARS that M and I have been together. We celebrated by going out for gourmet locally-grown food and then listening to the out of range album by ani difranco, which was the soundtrack for that evening 10 years ago. Very good fun. And wow -- I'm not used to having had things in my life that long. We have been through a lot. I am so lucky.

We need an army of guerrilla sex-ed teachers

It seems that virginity pledges are not working out the way their proponents had hoped. According to a recently published study, "pledgers" have the same rate of STDs as their non-pledging peers, they are less likely to use protection when they have sex, they are less likely to go to the doctor and get treated for the infections they do get, and they are very likely to replace vaginal intercourse with other kinds of sex that are also risky. For example: male "pledgers" are 4 times more likely than their non-pledging peers to be having anal sex. Which is fine, I hope they have a great time, but I sure as hell hope they're using those condoms nobody has taught them how to use!

This is all a very funny joke on the uptight Christians until I remember how much funding the US federal government is putting into this kind of program, and how much they're NOT funding actual sex education. How many kids are going to get HIV while "saving their virginity for marriage" before we get the idea that kids need real information?

Meanwhile, I have a co-worker who teaches teenage girls in jails about how to not get HIV. And she tells me that said teenage girls have some pretty interesting ideas about how bodies work. Recently the girls in her class told her that (as everyone knows, they said) "booty sex will give you more junk in the trunk in 4 days and a wake-up." Translation: if you have anal sex, you will have bigger, sexier butt-cheeks by the morning of the fifth day afterward. They had trouble believing her when she told them it wasn't so.

Big kids learn from little kids

I was web-browsing pretty much at random when the phrase "teaching children emotional literacy" caught my eye. I'm working with some kids who are having significant trouble with this. So now I'm wondering again whether the blue states could just join Canada, because once again they have got the cool stuff.

Roots of Empathy is a program that reduces bullying in schools and helps kids learn to understand emotions by bringing babies and their parents into classrooms and asking the kids to figure out what the baby is experiencing and what it needs. Remind me, again, why our school system has kids spending time always and only with kids exactly their own age?

Checking out del.icio.us

I have been distracted, these past couple of days, by del.icio.us. I've been seeing references to it and finally decided to check it out. You geeks out there who have already been there and done that can skip this -- but for the rest of us this is worth talking about. It's dead simple, really, but way more powerful than it looks at first.

What it's useful for:
- Place to keep your bookmarks on the web, so you can get to them from any computer.
- Sorting your bookmarks in whatever way you want, by giving them tag-words you make up. Each link can have as many different tags as you want, and you can filter for one tag or a combination of tags. Your account page has a list of tag-links along the side so you can get at things easily.
- Finding out what other people are bookmarking. You can see everyone's bookmarks with a particular tag, or see who else links to the same site you do and then see what else they link to. If you find someone who frequently bookmarks stuff that's interesting to you (generally or under a particular tag), you can subscribe to their links and automatically find out what they're looking at.

I'm trying not to spend all my time mucking about with this, so del.icio.us/becca doesn't have a ton of stuff on it yet. But I will definitely be using this. Friends, if you're there too, let me know where I can find your page?

Fluorescent lights

Ever since environmentalists have started promoting how energy-efficient their compact fluorescent light bulbs are, I have been wishing fervently that they would all go to hell. I am one of those people (apparently 1/3 of the human population) who is sensitive to the flicker of fluorescent lights. I don't have it as bad as some -- I don't get migraines from it -- but I'm uncomfortable. My anxiety level is higher, my concentration is not as good, and I feel like it will be physically impossible for me to relax until that light is off or I leave the room.


The particularly challenging bit is that my household is pretty hard-core in trying to do all the stuff we can to reduce our environmental impact, make things energy efficient, etc. For the most part I am fully on board with this. But when we get around to light bulbs, we have trouble. They want to replace as many light bulbs as possible with compact fluorescents. I have been saying, basically, over my dead body.

Because I want peace in my household, I have been doing research. I figured maybe I'd find a solution to my problem, maybe I'd find scientific data to back up my "hell no." Either would be better than nothing. What I've got so far seems to be a little of both. It's also longish and probably boring, unless you have reason to obsess about this like I do. Proceed at your own risk.

There seems to be agreement out there that the older fluorescents -- the ones that hum, visibly flicker, and give dead, cold light -- are not good for people. There are studies showing significantly improved performance in school children in classrooms with full-spectrum light versus cool white fluorescent, and parallel studies for workplaces. On a hopeful note, these studies seem to agree that mixing fluorescent light with natural sunlight or incandescent (non-flickering) light can ameliorate some of the unpleasantness, or even block out the flicker effect.

Everybody including the people selling fluorescent lights will admit to these problems, because they want to tell you that their new improved CF (compact fluorescent) bulb is better than that. I can't count the number of kinds of them we have ordered by mail, just to try, just in case. None of them has yet been better than barely tolerable for me.

There seem to be several different variables to play with when making new improved CF bulbs. "Color temperature" is the color of the light that is emitted. The color rendering index (CRI) of a lamp rates its ability to render an object's true color when compared to sunlight, on a scale of 0 (bad) to 100 (good). Full spectrum fluorescents can apparently reduce a lot of the ill effects caused by "cool white" fluorescents -- but the full spectrum bulbs we've tried still haven't been pleasant to be around.

I also found out today about another different variable: the difference between magnetic and electronic ballast. This determines how fast the flicker is. Older fluorescents have magnetic ballast and flicker at about 60 cycles per second. Electronic ballast makes the flicker a lot faster, so it's supposedly way too fast for a human to perceive at all. Gaiam (trying to sell their light bulbs) says this completely addresses the problems usually caused by fluorescent light. The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (not trying to sell anything) says that switching to electronic ballast has reduced the number of complaints by 50%. Gaiam also lost some points with me because when I looked at specific bulbs on their site, there was no way to tell if they use electronic ballast or not, or how the bulb rated for color temperature or rendering, even though they had just told me I should be looking for those things. Does anyone know how you can tell, looking at a bulb, which kind of ballast it has?

This information may be moderately helpful to me. I can probably deal with mixing some CF with some incandescent bulbs, in rooms where more than one bulb is usually on. And this one bulb (the "warm glow" one) that M just bought that doesn't seem to be so bad -- maybe that's the difference that the ballast makes? I want to figure out how to confirm that. I still don't want to go out and buy a ton of them, because I'm afraid my not minding it might not last. But it's something to mess around with, anyway.

Meanwhile, I found some other interesting stuff along the way:


This guy is concerned that LED displays (like this here laptop monitor I'm using) may have similar health effects to fluorescent light. Boy am I lucky I haven't had a problem with that so far.

Fluorescents, like sunlight, suppress the production of the hormone melatonin. Usually we make it at night while we sleep. Too much melatonin can cause depression, such as in Seasonal Affective Disorder. This is why people use bright fluorescents to treat SAD. On the other hand, melatonin also suppresses the growth of cancer cells, especially estrogen-sensitive ones. So women who work night shift under fluorescent lights have less melatonin and a higher risk of breast cancer.


Connection between agoraphobia and fluorescent light sensitivity?
"Women who suffer from agoraphobia (a fear of open or public places) developed a faster heart rate and abnormal visual effects when exposed to fluorescent lighting. The non- agoraphobic women exposed to fluorescent light reported more miscellaneous symptoms while under the fluorescent lights." (Psychological Medicine 20(3)591-596, August 1990)

"You are the man."

Those were the first words out of the guy's mouth when he was introduced to Robin this morning. He's the adult son of the woman who was meeting with us, at the place we're getting married this summer. He had apparently heard about the man and two women who were all marrying each other, and decided on the spot that that guy is his hero. He was much more straightforward about it than most. We got a very good laugh out of it.

Dream last night

[Background: My mom started asking her doctors what was up with her brain a couple years ago, because she was noticing having a lot more trouble than she used to have with keeping track of things. At first they were telling her that she had a couple silent strokes. The most recent neurologist says the strokes probably didn't cause the problems, and he wrote down the diagnosis of "Mild Cognitive Impairment, possible early Alzheimer's Disease." You never know for sure whether it's Alzheimer's, until it progresses to a point where it's clearly recognizable, or else you're looking back from some far future point and realizing it never did progress. In the meantime you basically have to prepare as if it were happening.]

I am at an Alzheimers Conference for Caregivers but the setting is really more like the Dance Flurry, big and spread out over lots of different buildings in a downtown not unlike Saratoga Springs. Mom and Dad are both around somewhere but I'm wandering on my own right now. There is a movie that is being shown at the conference, it's spoken very highly of as a way to better understand what the internal experience of Alzheimers is like over time. It's also supposed to be very depressing and I'm not sure I can handle it. I end up in a conversation with a bartender, whose bar is sort of a concession booth in a hotel lobby that's one of the sites for the conference. She's got mostly booze but she's telling me about this new medicine that she also has, that's supposed to let you experience something very sad without actually getting sad. It's a shot of bright-colored liquid. (I think there were red and green ones, don't know the difference. What she offers me is red.) Mostly what's in there besides the drug is aspartame, which I usually won't go near. She cautions me that the common side effect people have with this is forgetfulness, over a couple days after you take it. But I decide to try it. Kinda feel like I need it.
A little bit later I'm sitting in a lobby area trying to decide if I'm up for seeing this movie. I'm not, really, with or without the funky drug. It's not making me feel less sad, I just feel flaky and out of it and I want to go home. Mom appears and she is all energized and going to all the workshops and taking notes on everything and she's very urgent that I should make sure not to miss this and that and this, and especially that movie. It's very important to her that I see the movie. She's not picking up on the fact that I'm not doing very well. I say yes, I'll see the movie, because I'm not sure what else to say. She bustles off to the next thing. I feel like crap and decide to go home.
I get out to my car and find 5 white men wearing suits and ties in the process of getting into my car and getting ready to drive off. I approach the passenger side and I'm trying to get their attention, knocking on the glass and it takes them a while to notice me, but when I say excuse me, this is my car, one of them says oh sorry, that prius over there must be mine, and they go away. I'm in a hurry and get right into the car and start driving, and realize that I'm still on the passenger side and I can't reach the brake pedal. (Apparently the need to reach the gas pedal doesn't apply in this dream.) OK, this isn't that bad, I can mostly sort of control the car... I'm driving in a downtown area... I see my Dad on the other side of the street, standing outside smoking, and I want to tell him what's going on. I turn across to pull over in front of him -- crap, no brake -- and steer into the curb to stop the car, which works because I'm not going that fast. I start telling Dad (who is apparently untroubled by my strange arrival) about what's been happening, and the dream ends.

Work rollercoaster

Taking a minute to breathe, before I get back to my workday... I am sad
and disappointed. I got my hopes up, big time, for one of the women I
work with. She is addicted, badly, to crack. She is also really smart
and a really wonderful person when she's not in addict mode. She had to
give up custody of her 2 little kids last year because of the drugs, and
that hurts her all the time and she really wants to get them back. She's
also doing terrible things to her own health. But she hasn't been ready
to stop using. This Monday she told me it was time, she was ready, she
wanted to go for treatment. She brought it up herself. I worked my butt
off this week to make it happen. We got her a bed at a good place. I
went to her house today to let her know. She said no.

I shouldn't be surprised, at all. It happens this way at least as often
as someone actually makes it to rehab. And it doesn't mean she's never
going to go. But it is hard to take. Her health is bad enough, if she
keeps on the way she's going she might not live long enough to have
another moment of clarity. And I really do care about her.

A few months ago, Emma and Karin invited me to go to a panel with them,
which was the last class and graduation party for their certification
course to be foster parents. One of the things I learned there was that
foster parents choose to get attached to a child, knowing that they will
give them up and grieve for them, because it is exactly that attachment
that the child needs in order to continue healthy development. I can't
remember how she said it, but I remember one of the foster moms on the
panel saying something like, our willingness to open ourselves up to grief
is the gift that we give them, so that they can have a real mutual
attachment with us and feel loved and safe. That stuck with me.

It hadn't occurred to me before, but I think there's a parallel there with
my work situation. The relationship we have with folks is nothing like
parental. But we help people with what they want help with, without
telling them what to do, and we don't ever get mad and go away because
they didn't do what we wanted. And the fact that we do actually care is
maybe the only reason that we ever do any good. So I want to keep caring, even though it takes me on a rollercoaster sometimes.

Some stuff I found

from metafilter:

interactive human body -- very cool way to learn anatomy.

japanese psychiatric art -- as in art used to sell psychotropic drugs. weird.

For Kif, re: theory into practice

In her comment, Kif said:

> If it's just where you live, and that can't change, then you deal,
> and fear is only something you realize once you're "out"...

Yup. If you just don't have the power to make yourself safer, you get on with your life the best you can and don't spend a lot of time being afraid. If it happens, it happens. Nothing I can do about it. And any one individual has pretty seriously limited ability to do anything about crime.

But let's play what-if for a minute. Imagine that those arseholes banging on your door at 4am went on to get arrested that night, for disorderly conduct or drug possession or something. Imagine that someone saw them at your door, so the police know they were bugging you. And for the bit that's probably most unrealistic at this point, imagine that Montreal had Community Accountability Boards set up when it happened.

How would you feel if a CAB member contacted you, and asked you to come to the meeting where it would be decided what those guys would have to do, to repair whatever harm they did? To tell them, in as much or as little detail as you wanted to discuss, exactly how they affected you?

Just makin' stuff up here... maybe that 4am was 5 hours before an interview for a job you really really wanted, and you were all shaken up and underslept, and you blew the interview. Maybe one of your kids woke up and got scared when they came to the door, and had nightmares after that. Maybe other folks started knocking on your door because they saw these guys doing it and thought you were selling. Maybe this was the last straw on top of a bunch of little things in the neighborhood making you feel mad and unsafe, and you started to feel really powerless because you didn't have the money to move, and you started to get depressed about it. Or WHATEVER the actual effects were for you and your family.

You would have the chance to tell those guys, in a safe setting where they are obliged to listen and understand and recognize what this event meant to you. And you would be asked, what would these guys have to do, to regain good standing in YOUR eyes as members of your community? So you would feel fine about them being your next-door neighbors? And your answer to that (in combination with the input of the other affected people present) would be what they would have to do, or else go back to court.

Would you want to do that if you were asked? Some people take to the idea immediately, and a lot of others want nothing to do with it.

The fact that probably none of us have ever been asked, though, points up what I think is a pretty big gap in the way Western traditional criminal justice works. We pretty much punish the offenders and ignore the victims. If you're the victim of something "serious" it can be really socially isolating, because nobody quite knows what to say to you... and if whatever it was wasn't that "serious" we're pretty much expected to suck it up, maybe complain about it a bit but basically just deal. Most of the time, the people affected by a crime never get offered any support to work through what the experience meant for them, or heal from it. So by ourselves we do what we can, and chalk up the rest to "the way the world is."

My hope is that on the level of towns and cities and states and provinces, we're starting to do a little better at this, with these restorative justice practices, and we can get a whole lot better at it. But in the meantime, this work is mostly just being done in bits and pieces. It's even something you can do with kids. The simplest version is just to ask them:

-- What happened?
-- Who was affected?
-- How were they affected?
-- What are you willing to do to make it right?

For your next research project

I've known about Wikipedia for a while now. Haven't used it much -- I guess I'm not quite sure how much to trust the accuracy of the Internet's collaborative mind. But I've heard it's pretty on-target, and that very much appeals to my inner anarchist. Anybody out there have any experience with how reliable it is?

On the other hand, today is the first time I heard about Uncyclopedia, the free encyclopedia full of "misinformation and utter lies." You can just go there at any time of day or night and contribute to this great public work by making shit up about any topic you like. They just reserve the right to delete it if it isn't funny.

From theory to practice

Very exciting day. One of the Things I Think Should Be Done Differently in the world (you know, that miles-long list of mostly impossibly big things) is actually happening, and they're looking for people to help, and it's something I can actually do, and I'm going to do it.

The idea is that when people commit crimes -- especially, but not exclusively, with young offenders and with crimes where no one is seriously hurt -- instead of the usual jail/fines/probation sentencing, you can actually work with the offender to have them make reparations to the people affected by what they did, and address the underlying problems that led to what went wrong. Many of the people trying to convince the criminal justice systems of the world to try this call it Restorative Justice. There's a good bit of research to show that it works. Here is a great big list of where you can read about it if you are so inspired.

So I'm going to be on a Community Accountability Board! Albany County is going to expand them from one current board in one neighborhood, to a bunch of different boards in various neighborhoods and outlying towns. I went to an all-day training today. It's a bit scary, it's a big responsibility. But I will be working alongside some folks I know and very much respect, who have been doing this for a while. And I think, I hope, I can learn to be good at it.

There's a ton I could say about the training itself. For now, just one exercise, which I invite you to try at home. One of the tricks about how this process works is that the offender has to really believe that the board members are for real. You can't stay aloof and lecture them about how their behavior affects "the community" in the abstract, you have to give them reason to believe that it matters for your own life. Which it does, but the connections are not always easy to see. So the trainer asked the folks who have already been on the board to list off what kinds of crimes they dealt with: drug possession & sales, physical assaults, property damage, theft, loitering, loud parties, sex trade, etc. And then we were each asked (in pairs) to articulate, for each crime: how does the fact that this happened in your neighborhood affect YOU?

Today it was full daylight at 6:30am

And that means that even though there's still a ton of snow on the ground and it's been biting cold out, spring is coming. Today standing in the sun I can actually feel some heat from it. I haven't been minding this winter that much, but this week I've been thinking a lot more about spring.

A curious thing I was noticing, talking to Mom (who hates winter with a passion and has been counting the days til the equinox for some time now) -- spending time with pagans these past few years really has changed my sense of when the seasons change.

Basic summary, much distilled from Alexei's version, is: The 4 holidays that mark the change of seasons in (at least some) Celtic tradition are Samhain (aka Halloween, and the New Year on this calendar, 10/31 to 11/1), Imbolc (St.Brigid's Day, 2/1), Beltaine (5/1), and Lunasa (8/1). The summer half of the year starts at Beltaine and ends at Samhain; winter is Samhain to Beltaine. The second half of each, Imbolc to Beltaine and Lunasa to Samhain, are winter-becoming-summer and summer-becoming-winter, respectively.

This meant not very much to me for the first year or more I was observing these holidays, but this calendar has taken hold in my brain and makes sense now. Winter starts at the beginning of November. Summer starts at the beginning of May. And yes, spring in February. Given, not exactly the definition of spring most people are working with. But a shift has taken place. People have had their rest and hidden in their caves long enough and are starting to make plans and work on new projects. The light is coming back.

My day at work: condoms

One of the cool things about my job is that sometimes I get to read about sex on the Internet, all completely in the line of duty re: HIV prevention. Today's find: learning to enjoy using condoms. Everyone and his brother will tell you that you should use them, and most folks seem to assume that you're never going to like it that much but you just have to deal. Here's somebody who knows, telling you how it can be fun. Thanks to the sex workers for putting it out there.

Speaking of the sex workers, there need to be more places like this in the world.

Also, from Robin: how to hack your brain. Or figure out more about how it works, anyway. This book will be on my wishlist shortly.

Trying something new

OK, so I've been convinced to try this web log thing, because some good and far-away friends have them and it seems like a good way to keep in touch. And maybe I will journal more. But if I start doing this instead of interacting with people in person I must be stopped. I'm just the sort of introvert who would do that.