friday evening was the geek gathering. i remembered to take maus and passed it on to kojo. scott/loopylow is still working on getting the wheresthatbeen.com website up. the gathering appeared to be a success; unfortunately, i wasn’t feeling very socially “up”. it happens. not that i’m ever a social butterfly. but sometimes i’m more in the mood to be smiley and excited and communicative. i felt more introspective and contemplative and melancholy.
saturday my brother came down to visit. we went to the saint arnold’s brewery tour. at the tour they said they are hoping to be moving into their new building by the end of the month. afterward, we hit a half price books (the one on westheimer). i bought some stuff. i’ll split the list into not-country and country:
- eurythmics – revenge (rca)
- goldfrapp – supernature (mute)
- the heads – no talking just head (mca / universal)
- kmfdm – nihil (wax trax! / tvt)
- lard – the last temptation of reid (alternative tentacles)
- refused – the e.p. comp cd (burning heart / epitaph)
- santogold – santogold (downtown / lizard king)
even though i was a huge fan of the eurythmics back in the day, i never really went back and picked up all of their stuff on cd. so i have one more now…still missing a couple. the goldfrapp and santogold cds are randomish. both have been played on pandora/soma and/or recommended to me via amazon/others, so i decided to try them. i’ve never owned the heads’ album, which is the talking heads minus david byrne. i’ve got that lard album already, but the copy i have is one of a run where one of the track indicators was put in the wrong place. so i bought this one, and it’s one where the tracking is correct.
- johnny cash – love god murder (columbia / american / legacy)
- merle haggard and george jones – a taste of yesterday’s wine (sony)
- willie nelson, merle haggard, and ray price – last of the breed (universal / lost highway)
- dwight yoakum – dwight live (reprise / time warner)
none of these were “gotta have”s, but they piqued my interest enough to pick them up. i assume i already have most of the songs on the cash box, but i haven’t checked and i didn’t own this particular comp box yet.
a while after my brother left, i headed over to the potts for supper. i hung out there a few hours, including watching saturday night live (a fairly common tradition), then i headed back home.
sunday, like a lot of days, was sort of a wash. i ate lunch with the potts, then came home and went through some of the massive amounts of junk i need to sort, order, and/or throw away. i think i’m getting pretty close to getting most of the divorce junk processed.
i ordered the new xkcd volume 0 book sunday evening. and to tie it to the normal attitude/perspective of my blog, here’s a clever xkcd cartoon: creepy. unfortunately, while reality is not as pessimistic as the guy’s thoughts, it’s also not as optimistic as the cartoonist’s.
i recently installed virtual box at work. it’s an open source virtualization product from sun microsystems. it seems pretty slick. i’ve got a win xp virtual running to use office 2007. i got it set up in seamless mode, which makes the virtual os windows show up as if they just regular windows on my normal linux desktop. the only problem i’m currently having is the text within outlook 2007 seems just a bit fuzzy/blurry, and that’s annoying my eyes after using it for very long. i haven’t figured out how to fix that yet.
i’m still no further on figuring out the encoding problem on ye olde blog. i’ve been searching and reading stuff, but i was hoping for a google-fu’d fix and not a lot of personal effort. no such luck so far.
the mechanic called me today and my engine arrived. he’s got to get some work done so he has a bay open for me to bring my car in. hopefully that’ll be done by the end of this week. then i can start the process of getting all the various pieces in place to get the engine in the car and functioning. the end of november is the year-point for the car not running (due to the old engine blowing), so maybe it’ll be done before then.
lately things seem bleak and bland and pointless. work, personal, pleasure, hobbies, whatever. even though i’m somewhat pessimistic and melancholy about certain things, i usually have a sense of humour and some level of levity about day-to-day things — i enjoy joking and being silly and smiling. i’m kind of finding it hard to want to joke, talk, or care about much of anything. perhaps i just need to lower my standards some more.
I’m excited about your car! Can’t wait for a cruise around town in it. Glad you and Linc got to spend some time together. Glad you are getting stuff cleaned out too. WooHoo
Terry, the feelings you describe in the last paragraph of this post are the symptoms of depression. I’ve been working for a medical organization for 15 years and we are relentlessly trained to recognize them. Depression really is a medical condition that can be treated. My suggestion would be to look up Lutheran Social Services for some assistance. I know you are not Lutheran, but they work from a Christian perspective, and that should help you feel more comfortable about it. Please don’t wait to do this. Depression does not cure itself. It will get worse if you don’t do something. Please take the advice of an old friend who cares about you.
i appreciate your concern, tim. and i’m not going to deny the plausibility that i have difficulty with some levels of depression now and then. but to some degree, you also have to consider that my writing on here is sometimes rather raw…written in the moment of feeling rather than filtered through time and level-headedness. i also tend to punctuate negative feelings and temper positive ones, both in life and on here. so just seeing “me” on here may provide a skewed perspective. as much as seeing me in real life may give a skewed perspective that i’m more emotionless and/or content than i really am — like most people, i filter the “me” the world sees when i’m out and about. i’ve always been a contemplative, sometimes melancholy personality. and i feel depressed at times. but it’s never been bad enough that i can’t go to work, or get out of bed, or eat, or any of that higher clinical-level stuff. while it may be chemical, i think it’s more likely tied to life events, and flaws in my own personality that exacerbate my lack of faith in things working out. i don’t think it’s much different than people who are eternally and unrealistically optimistic. except it’s probably better for one’s constitution to be an optimist than a pessimist — like people generally don’t go around telling optimists they need to get assistance so they can be more realistic about things. so i view it sort of like early risers versus late risers, or people who perpetually plan to those who always play it by ear, or those who are always early versus always late, etc. one is viewed positively by society, the other not — but both personalities are viable and exist.
Well, it’s not just this post but several — and many more recently than before. You don’t have to be nonfunctional to be depressed and in need of some help. And it doesn’t have to be a constant state as much as feelings that come and go, as you describe them. I really think that you should consider it.