It's not supposed to hit here. They think it's going to take a right at the coast, cut across Florida, and head up the eastern seaboard.

However, if it were to take a left instead of a right...

Well, this seems like a good time to update the 3-Day Kit, is all I'm gonna say.

The only thing worse than going through the motions is not having motions to go through; I've said this a bunch of times.

I had an almost completely unproductive week -- granted, this was by design for a couple days, the beach was involved, that doesn't explain the rest of the week though -- and now have That Inertia Sensation setting in, and no settled commitments for several weeks. And I wonder if the modern academic lifestyle is designed to make people inertially bipolar, which I think I just invented as a phrase but it's the thing where you either vegetate or go at an unsustainable pace, since I was scrambling and falling apart during the semester and now seem to have all the get-up-and-go of pudding. I can't, I really can't, keep doing this to myself, this thing where I wake up and study and teach and study and do a survivable minimum for my students because I'm not even doing a survivable minimum for myself and then feel guilty when so many of them quit and/or fail.

I don't know what the alternative is going to turn out to be but I think I'm, to use a word I stumbled across and had a moment of "OMG they have a word for that," decompensating; to put it in plain language, I'm struggling to give the square root of a damn. About anything. The things I hold out in front of myself as something to hope for aren't working; I automatically go to "I'll just mess it up again." In this state of mind I totally get why people drink or drug themselves into mental or even actual oblivion and if those weren't on my unthinkable list I would have done it by now. I don't want anything except to quit everything. It's not constant, I have days like yesterday where the fog clears enough for me to think about how it sucks that I might be wearing clothes from a collapsing factory, but some days I don't have enough spoons to push the fog back just so I can feel better. If someone else needs me, that's more important, which, if I were doing the therapy thing, would be a thing for them to quiz me about.

Now that I have time that's not stolen from something else, I could write, draw, do math of my choosing rather than for a grade, sew, work on setting up online classes, put in a garden...out of all that, I've done basic adjustments on one t-shirt pattern, and I'm not sure I'm happy with them, and even that doesn't account for anything more than a couple hours. And those are things that I generally want to do, but want hurts.

Rationally, I know that staying stuck like this, that being pudding and waiting for the universe to forget me, is a bad plan. But it's hard when I'm not sure what else is worth the pain of wanting it.

Does anyone else out there think that the combination stylus/ink pen is a device that should never have been invented?

How about refusing to own one because you're pretty sure you'd write on your screen eventually?

And can I get a few bucks back from SquareTrade if I sign an agreement to do what I'm doing anyway? Because they must hate those things.

I'm a few weeks late on blogging the collapsing factories. Or early on blogging the next overseas manufacturing disaster, take your pick.

And of course the overseas manufacturing issue is More Complicated Than That. Most factories don't collapse, and the oversimplified panic point of "just a few dollars pay a day" doesn't figure in legitimate differences in cost of living: if I can rent a decent apartment or little house and put beans and rice and veggies and a couple times a week a fish or chicken on the table for a couple dollars a day, that's really not where we need to point our worry energy. They're not trying to shop in New York; we have to consider the pay in terms of local purchasing power.

On the other other hand, considering Complications doesn't mean giving the whole issue the "that's the best job they can get" brushoff, either. For anyone's best opportunity to involve risking getting crushed by a collapsing factory, not even to fix it but to keep making shoes or jeans, is shameful for us as a species. Not just the profit-driven factory owners, not just the corporations that resell things...the bargain hunters who grab five dollar shirts, vaguely aware that sweatshops exist but contented by "out of sight, out of mind"; the "fashionistas" who want style first and as much as possible, which means as cheap as possible, second; the working class or lower middle class households who can't otherwise afford their lifestyle and think they're being smart by living above their means as long as the prices are artificially low, who can if we feel snarky be called Save Money Live Better Zombies but unfortunately this covers almost all of us.

Meanwhile, we're destroying our economy by exporting the manufacturing jobs, pumping money out of the country or out of circulation into the importing companies, with the result that even more people think they have to buy cheap imported things.

There are information barriers to implementing this, and to some extent also lacks of alternatives, but can we start from the concept that if you can't afford it without someone's human rights being violated, you just can't afford it? You have to either do without whatever it is, or cut back somewhere else.

How to actually accomplish this...well, I haven't worked this all out. But I think the key thing is going to be "cut back somewhere else." It's going to involve accepting the possibility of living a little less high on the hog, which is not easy to sell anyone on. The only reason I'm thinking about it is that it bothers me that someone almost just like me might have a crappy life so that I can have this shirt I'm wearing, and what would I be if I didn't try to find another way?

I don't do small talk. If I weren't annoyed by most cases of verbification, that sentence might have been "I don't small talk."

More often than I want to think about, when BF and I are out shopping, we'll run into people he knows. I pretty much stand there looking stupid while they catch up or whatever.

If only I were a different species. Then there would be creatures that I fit in with somewhere. As it is, since fitting in to something is a requirement for everything, as far as I can tell I'm eventually doomed, whatever I try.

What? Me? Base a presentation for my current class (Technology and Communication in Mathematics; aka LaTeX/SAGE Boot Camp; aka Becnel's Class Where Everyone Gets An A) on my presentation from Mathematical Modeling at WGU?

Hey, I'm sure not gonna come up with anything better before Thursday, so, you better believe I'm recycling.

Green, blue, and violet get through, and they kind of average out to blue.  And I was an ed major, so thanks to Frank's Fake Science I'm barely scientifically literate.

You're slipping, XKCD.

Stand on the shore smother the shame
You can do nothing more
The tears in your eyes washed by the rain
What was the sacrifice for?
--Dougie MacLean

I grabbed this on the first of last month with intent to comment on it that day. Yeah, that didn't happen.

It still applies, though. I still look at the sacrifices I made, like pretty much all of undergrad (boring low-level classes because I thought they were the path to a future), then dumping time and money into trying to salvage that future or some approximation.

Now I'm about to be 29, still in school because I can't find anything else to do with myself, and I can't help but wonder what all those sacrifices were for, and especially what I'm currently sacrificing my time and stability for.

I'm talking about this in the context of mental health because that's the one that affects me. Generally I don't repost things from other awareness campaigns either because I suspect that my response to them is not unique, but I am not qualified to discuss how someone with MS or fibromyalgia or diabetes, for example, might feel about those campaigns, however my opinion in general of "awareness" is that it's less than useful in the absence of a change in behavior, so the worthwhile awareness campaigns are those that ask people to do something like get their shots, designate a driver, or vote on an issue.

From time to time someone decides to try to make a graphic go viral because it's Mental Health Awareness Nanosecond or something like that. When there is a somewhat widely recognized such observance, my news feed on Facebook gets deluged in ribbons, flowers, sunrises, fields, clouds, and above all else, platitudes. This is theoretically supposed to make me feel understood, or something...to be honest I've never quite worked that out. Some of them are harmless, some are annoying because they provide false explanations to make the more common issues sound more relatable to regular people. About once in a cycle of this, one of the reposters -- usually a RLer rather than a game buddy; the people I don't actually know bother me less -- gets my opinion as a comment.

Then the ribbons and flowers blow away and I still have depression.

For those of you who are "normal" -- who, when you have a rough day, can usually point to a reason proportionate to how bad it was, and if there's no particular main reason you can be almost certain the next day will be better -- sorry, but you need to know this. The platitudes you repost are the equivalent of patting me on the head and saying it's not that bad. They make you feel like you're oh so very nice for doing something for those unfortunate people, so you get to boost your self-esteem, by trivializing and in many cases directly contradicting my lived experience. Your pretty pictures and pretty platitudes exclude me and turn my problem into your holiday to decorate for.

Every day is depression awareness day for me. Every day, I have to fight to get out of bed because, in that moment of fatigue brought on by a night's sleep that was usually foreshortened by finishing dragging myself through some inadequate approximation of my day's work tasks around 10 PM so then I can drive home and make dinner and attempt a little housecleaning (this is not quite every day, but it's normal for a weekday) and on any day I'm not too exhausted this gets topped off by insomnia due to anxiety fed by the things I didn't get to...well, in that moment, staying in bed forever and letting the world happen without me doesn't sound so bad because I don't want to try to do anything ever again. Every day, I push through all that, even though I'm so physically and mentally exhausted that getting dressed -- not like for a party, just minimal public decency plus the usual undergarments -- is enough work compared to my energy level that on weekends and holidays I seriously question whether being able to leave the house is worth it.

Clicking a share link just. doesn't. compare.

Go volunteer at a suicide prevention line, if you want to understand and help people with mental health problems. Even then you'll have to keep in mind that the people who call those are a special case among depressed people -- they're comparing their pain to the pain they'd cause by ending their pain, and they don't know which is more important, so they're calling to try to figure it out. Most of us are firmly on the "we aren't important enough to do that to everyone that knows us" side of that divide; the ones that aren't are the ones we all hear about. (This is partly why there are so many suicides while getting onto meds: the worst thing you can do to a depressed person is make them feel just a little better.)

Or just stop broadcasting what you think depression is, or anxiety or any other diagnosis, and start asking instead. Ask me why I talk about spoons -- that metaphor was designed for a physical disability, so the translation to mental health isn't obvious. Ask me, if you can ask it as an actual question rather than a suggestion, why I'm not doing any of the standard "treatments" like meds or counseling. Ask me, if I know you in meatspace, why you can't tell the difference between my normal (which is not your normal) and bad days except for the very worst. If you're someone from the Internet to me, ask your meatspace friend who has depression or a related condition, because you almost certainly have one such friend, though you might need to figure out which friend that would be because we blend in.

You have no right to try to change someone else's awareness level if you're not also doing something about your own.

As much as I hate being that person who puts their relationship all over the internet, I have to say something here. Anyway it's not really about the relationship; that's more of a context.

As I've mentioned to most people who know me as other than words on a screen, BF fixes computers. Only, he took a side job, a several years ago now, even though the pay sucked, because the hours were there. This job has sent him out of town for close to a week at a time, making it impossible for him to build his business up to where it covered his expenses; part of the plan when we started renting on the same property, thus being able to split bills, was that, since I was starting a much better paying job at the same time and would be bringing in more than our previous combined income, I would handle what would otherwise be a shortfall when he quit the crappy job to build his client list up. The plan was for this to have happened two and a half years ago, a couple months into that job for me so that I'd have some savings put back, but the job went all wrong (could a person who wasn't me have made it work? potentially; were there other factors that undermined me? definitely; do I want to go into the details? not at the moment, it doesn't currently matter) and I wasn't able to hold up my end of that deal.

So all the rest of this is in effect my fault.

Ever since then we've been trying to find another chance for BF to quit the crappy job and build his business. Not just because it's a crappy job -- after all, someone has to do the crappy jobs too -- but because there's no future in it. There's been neither an actual raise nor a cost of living adjustment since he signed on, in 2007 or so. Not even a change to the milage reimbursement rates when gas keeps going up. And you can get fired for doing exactly the job they tell you to do, in exactly the intended time, if you go into overtime on the wrong client. Anyone should quit a job like that if they can. There have actually been chances -- when I got my student loans from WGU, that created a cushion that could have been used, and we planned to try to do that, several times. Every time, there was a series of "just another busy couple weeks to get through" until the cushion dwindled. Then, his boss quit as of the first of last month, and he said he would quit at the same time, and then..."just another busy couple weeks to get through" happened again and he's still there. He's saying there's a week left now, or something...I don't even hear the amount of time any more, really.

Last night, he told me about a part time job running paperwork around that he's going to do (he theoretically hasn't agreed to it as yet but I can see how this is going) for one of his clients, at the same pay rate as the crappy job. This on top of an out-of-town contract job completely unrelated to his business, that pays well at first glance, but, after a hotel room and meals out...

So basically we had an argument last night about how even if he actually does quit the crappy job he's filling up almost his whole schedule with low-value activities and won't have time to promote his business anyway. Completely pointless to argue about I know, me making a bitch of myself isn't going to change how he plans. And most of the time I choke it in, for just that reason, because it's pointless. Even though what I'm choking in is two and a half years, now, in which every damn time he mentions that job I know it's my fault he still has to do it. He's locked away from doing what he was meant to do because I failed at what I thought I was meant to do (assuming for the moment that there is such a thing as "meant to." I don't like that concept because in the past several years evidence has accumulated that I'm meant to be useless).

Every time he has to go waste his time on that stuff, what I hear, because that's a consequence of this, is that I'm a waste of space.

Sometimes this slips out.

Maybe I'm too good at acting normal, because somehow he's still surprised when it slips out, somehow he doesn't know that that's what I hear.

I can't un-know that it's my fault, so it would be irrational to stop feeling bad about it.

And I have to act normal, and even do stuff that's outside of most people's normal range, through this.