Let's let this blog follow me into depression, shall we? It has been coming on for two weeks and right now I feel like I am in the middle of it.

It would be nice if we knew whether ex-boyfriend Keith was a chicken or an egg but I think there was birthday-related depression swirling near me and sleeping with him scooted me over the edge and into the vortex. There was also a fear (irrational?) that a relationship with Patrick can't work out because I don't always like the way he smells.

Work being what it is -- demanding, unrelenting, and with rewards that come intermittently -- sucked me further in. Work has not been much fun since mid-November.

I stopped socializing, stopped listening to voice mail, stopped opening my mail at home, stopped putting dirty dishes into the dishwasher, stopped writing in this diary, stopped showering and wearing clean clothes. This went on for a week.

Then my period arrived! The day before I was going back to Tahoe for the weekend. I believe as I have gotten older my period has begun to coincide with serious anxiety, deep frustration, a short temper, and a desire to hide somewhere. Sprinkle in some existential questions of whether I should have ever been born. Add some fear of dying alone, and now the swirling vortex is really got a hold on me.

Which leads to the acting out. Telling Patrick on Sunday that things are going too fast and let's slow down. For him this came from nowhere. The moment I found myself in this conversation I wanted to back up and not say what I said. I really enjoy spending time with him. My fears are just my fears.

Then not talking to him for two days. I didn't call him and I really started freaking out that the relationship would end. Fini.

Cue the not sleeping. Add the poor diet. And the lack of concentration at work. And the not talking to friends and family.

Talking to Patrick helped and it's not over but...I'm all jumpy and I could cry at any moment. Taking a walk consumes all the energy I have. I'm seven pounds overweight.

Something disturbs my sleep in the middle of the night so I stay in bed until 1:30 today. I haven't been grocery shopping in two weeks and I have nothing to eat. Patrick doesn't call to make plans for tonight and I convince myself that I'm being stood up. I do not call him to find out what's up. I just watch TV all day, hungry, without showering, without talking to anyone.

This is depression.

Here's how to overcome depression:

1. Clean. Sweep everthing, dust, spray and wipe every surface, especially the bathroom. Wash the windows if you can.
2. Do all the laundry and put it all away.
3. Pay bills.
4. Buy groceries and fresh flowers.
5. Exercise.
6. Call every friend in town and make plans, even if they are two weeks away.
7. Get the car washed.
8. Make a list of personal and work things that need to be done and put them into your calendar.
9. Shower every day, first thing in the morning. Wear clean clothes and makeup.
10. Leave the house at least a couple of times each day.

If these things are done, the depression will lift within two weeks and life will seem OK again. Sometimes you can't find the energy to do those things. Sometimes you can't do them all and you end up buying a bottle of wine every night and sitting on your couch. You see your voice message count rise to double digits. People start calling you to ask why you haven't returned their 3 phone calls. You start spending twelve hours a day in front of your laptop and you don't get anything done at all. You stop brushing your teeth. You drink coffee and eat junk food and your face breaks out. This can go on for a long time. Hopefully it won't. I did a lot of laundry today. :)

Patrick's on his way to the Bay Area and we are going to the circus tonight. I'm jumpy and freaky and I am afraid I will say something wrong while I'm with him. I really hope this all works out OK. At least I have a little Christmas present for him. I think that will be nice.

Sucks

Whatever woke me up at 3am sucks. And the fact that I haven't got back to sleep and it's 5:20am sucks. AND the fact that I feel angst about Patrick coming (actually the angst is over fear that he is not coming) to town tonight to go out with me really sucks.

I hope I can fall asleep before the sun comes up and sleep in today. That would be better.

Because I Owe It To My Fans

Let's call this an obligatory blog post.

I haven't posted for the past week because I have had nothing to say. Nothing funny has happened to me. I haven't had any epiphanic moments. I got my hair cut (cute!) and had a belated b-day dinner with Don and Dianna and family and friends, but BLAH pretty much sums it up.

Here's the iDog I got for Nicole (age 9) for Christmas:

You plug your ipod into it to play music through its speaker. It also plays a light show and moves its ears and maybe its legs. I think it is IDEAL for a 9 year old girl.

That's all I've got. Perhaps the creativity will return in the new year. Perhaps I will sit and write my goals for the year on New Years Day according to old traditions.

What's the Big Deal about Religion?

Today both Fussy and Brainhell have posts about God or god and all of that ruminating got me to thinking about my own point of view. I am not aligned with Ms. Kennedy or Brainhell since one seems quite athiestic and the other scientifically mystic. Othejoys believes in the Church of the Zoo and that's getting closer. But me?

I went to church every Sunday as a child, to choir practice on Tuesdays, catechism on Wednesdays, and often volunteered at the church taco hut on Saturdays with my Irish Catholic mother. My mom, president of the Altar and Rosary Society, laundered the holy vestments used in daily mass. I learned to iron by pressing pure white handkerchiefs with cardinal red embroidered crosses.

I can remember feeling the power of the holy spirit a number of times during mass, mostly on the holidays when the rituals of the Catholic church lent a certain majesty to the proceedings.

As a child those experiences seemed transformational since I believed that obeying the laws of the church gave me first-class reservations for heaven. I fretted over babies who died before being baptized because the laws condemned them to Purgatory. I wondered what would happen to Mom's Jewish friends when Jesus came again.

I tried to obey the laws of the church to the letter. I made up sins to confess to the priest in case I had forgotten something terrible I had done. I worried we could all go to hell if Jesus came on a Tuesday, three days before Friday confession, and we accidentally had mortal sins on our souls.

By the time I was seventeen I still believed in God and Jesus but the Catholic church had lost its appeal. The priest's answers to my legitimate questions in catechism were dismissive and dogmatic. My sense of the priest's and the church leaders' point of view was that this is a club where there are rules to follow, and hell to pay if you don't obey. I had had several negative experiences where I perceived a certain hypocrisy in our priest.

So fast forward twenty years. I still believe in God but I'm more interested in having a conversation about principles than in consulting a book that offers rules. I believe in kindness, especially kindness toward oneself. I don't like the idea of threatening hell for nonconformists. I believe in demonstrating moral behavior. I believe in making things right when you have done wrong. I believe in self-reflection and compassion. I believe in lifelong learning. I believe there are people in this world who will make the same mistakes time after time, and that they must be forgiven. I believe there are some very evil people in the world.

I don't do the right thing all the time. No one does. Knowing that keeps me from crucifying my friends and family for their transgressions, at least most of the time.

I'm not sorry I grew up in a religious household. Since my mother died when I was 18 there has been no one to chastise me for leaving the church. Maybe it would be different if anyone had encouraged me to feel the Catholic guilt as an adult. But in looking back, I think the benefits of the community aspect of the church were enough to overcome the limits of the religion. I go to the Buddhist temple for a certain feeling of community that doesn't order up a belief in Jesus and Satan.

I believe spirituality is critical to a healthy inner life, and I believe spirituality is personal by nature. I'm glad not to be confused by my spirituality any longer, as I was for years after my mom died. I imagine athiests, agnostics, and the faithful all have a personal sense of sprirituality and it's enough to allow all of us to connect on some level. Be kind. Do the right thing. Live and let live. That's how I feel about religion.

I Don't Like Where This Post Is Headed

Yesterday started with a phone call from Keith, one that lasted an hour and made little or no sense. We had never spoken despite the bout of emails and phone messages in September, and that was by and large OK with me. I was surprised to hear his voice.

He caught me up on his life -- he lost his job a while back and spent the summer in Cabo San Lucas working on his brother's fishing boat. His upstairs neighbor, who drove Keith nuts with constant noise unmuffled by carpets or good manners, died of a heart attack while in spinning class at the gym. The little feral cat in his back yard is still there, and Keith is still feeding her. It seemed like Keith hadn't changed at all.

I spent the rest of my day running errands (because the rain actually stopped for a few hours) and at 4pm I was at home reading my In Touch celebrity gossip magazine when there was a knock at my door. It was Keith, and he wanted me to go to Mad Dog in the Fog for a drink with him. Spontaneity is the spice of life, he said.

So a drink turned into dinner and a few games of pool and we ended up back at my apartment making out all over the place. Last night with Keith marks the first time I have ever cheated on a boyfriend and I can't say why I did that. Some part of me wanted to test whether I could control my feelings for Keith, and this morning I am not at all sorry that he and I are not together. I don't think it will happen again. It's wrong to have one more time for old time's sake when there is someone else in the picture but fuck it that's what I did. And I'm never NEVER telling Patrick.

Dude Where's My Car?

Party update: It was raining so damn hard when I left for Party #1 that I dropped the charity auction gift for Party #2 in the water on the ground. It was a picture frame and lucky for me the glass didn't break. Nonetheless it was a bad way to begin the odyssey of Saturday night party-going.

I finally made it to Orinda (did I say it was forty minutes away? Strike that, it is one hour and twenty minutes when the rain is pounding away and everyone else in the Bay Area is mid-odyssey in their own party-going).

The whole way there I kept an eye on how much traffic was going the other direction and I decided there was no way in hell I would make it to Party #2 unless I turned around right now.

And that was fine. I was happy being at Mark and Dina's party.

The average age of the partygoers in Orinda was 40 but I put heavy emphasis on the average age because there were about fourteen children under 7 who balanced fourteen senior citizens in sequined-and-bejeweled Christmas finery. There were also around eight or ten people my age (the parents of the under-7 set) and I was the only single person there. But regardless of all that, it was fun.

Old men seem to love to talk to me and I love flirting with them so I had a great time chatting up the country club set. I also sat by the cookie table for quite a while so I got to make friends with a good number of the kids.

• It suddenly strikes me that in my 20's my party strategy was to hang out near the keg to meet all the people at the party and nowadays my party strategy is to hang out near the cookie table.

Unfortunately my hostess's 75-year-old father backed into my Subaru as he was leaving so I've got a big dent across both the front and back doors. But you know, I am so infused with the Christmas spirit that I don't even mind. No improper flirtation occurred and I left the party late enough that traffic wasn't an issue on the way back.

PARTY!

I did not go to Lake Tahoe this weekend because two friends are having Christmas parties and I wanted very much to go. Often I wonder if my regular jaunts to the lake will one day cause me to cut myself off from life in the city, and I don't want that.

The first party begins at 6:30 in Orinda (it's 5:35 now). The second includes a while elephant charity auction and is about 10 blocks from my apartment.

Orinda is a good 40 minute drive from here. I've got about a half hour to shower, dress, buy a couple of nice hostess gifts, gather up my auctionable white elephant objects, and go out in the cold, cold rain. Guess what? I don't want to go. I'm hoping something inspires me soon.

The second party is being given by a woman from work and I like her a lot. However, I always flirt with her boyfriend to a point beyond what propriety recommends. I can't really help it, he's so attractive. I always go to these social things to hang out with her and end up talking to him with great interest and when he says something funny I just laugh and laugh. After her Christmas party last year I wrote a note that said "it's not a good idea to keep inviting me to your parties because I am hot for your boyfriend," but I didn't give it to her. I threw it away and vowed to behave at the next one. Fat chance. Heh heh.

The party in Orinda is being thrown by dear friends who have been trying very hard to conceive but have been unsuccessful. My heart wants them to have a baby. This party will be attended, I'm told, by quite a number of elderly folks who sponsored them for their country club. I do love the thought of being the youngest at a party. Hasn't happened for a while. I had better get busy, yo. It's time to party.

What the Hell is That

OK, one more blog post and then I'm done for the day. And hang onto your hats people because you probably don't need to know this.

I have a pimple on my fanny.

Not the American version of the fanny. You folks with the English ancestry know what fanny I'm talking about.

I freaked out when I found it yesterday in one of those early-morning-before-I-really-wake-up-scratchy-scratchy moments because quite honestly I've been sharing my private bits quite a lot lately. I am afraid of the HERPES and I always have been, but unless there is someone who's lying, I've only been with one person with the herpes and he was properly sheathed at all times. But that person was ten months ago and there's a chance that all the sheathing in the world can't keep you from it.

So off to the doctor, right?

Wrong. Where do YOU live? Where can you actually get a dr.'s appt. on the same day you need one. Please. I can get an appt. for Wednesday next week and by then this pimple-thingy had better either be gone without a trace or else ... um ... well, it had better just be gone.

I did a google search and I think this thing is called Folliculitis. I'm pretty sure I don't have the herpes, and my doctor is probably pretty sick of me calling for appointments to make absolutely sure.

I did a search on Google for "bump on my labia" and now whenever I start googling with the letters "bu" the phrase "bump on my labia" will appear above "business blogging seminar" until I type something other than an "m" and a "p" and so on. Sometimes I like the Googling features, sometimes not so much. I'm also afraid that somehow the large multinational corporation where I work is compiling a profile of me based on my googling and my emailing. So when that guy who wanted to join my ski cabin and I told him we were pretty fond of the weed wrote back to me on my work email about "not OK with the pot smoking" I got a little bit concerned about my permanent record at work. Strange and paranoid? I think not.

Can you tell I started with the wine more than an hour ago? This entry may soon be deleted.

Mustard: I Make the Rules

How many times can you leave brown mustard sitting out on the counter unrefrigerated for hours and not throw it away?

The answer? There is no direction to Keep the Mustard Refrigerated, so I guess you can leave it out as long as you like.

Unless it's the brown mustard that lives in my refrigerator, which has a freshness date of Jun 01 2005. I noticed that when I was looking for the refrigerator decree.

It's 4:44 and I'm having chocolate cake and a glass of wine.

Have I mentioned how working from home has enhanced my life?

Free Bird

I just took a half an Ativan so that my afternoon at work would be smooth sailing. I felt like any more adversity might make me wear my frustration on the outside, and given the amount of frustration I'm feeling on the inside? Would be a bad scene.

This day is the day Kevin got out of jail, and I went there to see him when he got out. I took him home, fed him, gave him the mail that had arrived. His things included his state ID and some papers from the lawyers we retained for probate of my dad's estate. Kevin filled out the papers, had a little meal and a piece of chocolate cake, picked up a bicycle he had left at my place nearly a year ago, and made some calls.

He was able to secure a bed in a Salvation Army facility in Oakland beginning tomorrow, which means he needs to find a place to spend the night tonight. I drove him and his bicycle back downtown and wished him luck. I hope he makes it.

Ah, and the Ativan? Every now and then I have a little pill. I can't remember the last time I took one but I have a sense that the anxiety I felt all day would just build once I got to Frustrationville, which is work lately. The pill affects me by chilling me out extremely, to the point where I appear as if I didn't get any sleep the night before or I'm quite preoccupied, and I'm slow to react. This is the perfect response (in my opinion) to over-stimulation from anxiety and frustration. Rather than responding in a stressed way to the people who are stressing me out, I can just think things through and respond with equanimity like I normally do.

So we'll see how it goes. Good luck, Kevin. And here's to a short afternoon working!

It may seem like I abandoned this blog but the truth is that I have actually been working during the 9 to 5 shift. Rather than take 25 minutes to read my favorites each day I've been doing that thing I do for money.

The ski season officially started last weekend. Eric, Nicole, and I went to Kirkwood, skied 3 runs and ended up in the cafe having some greasy fried food and beer from a blasted bartender. Hooray! the season begins.

We stuck around Kirkwood until 6pm when our Full Moon Hike began. Fully suited in our ski gear and some snowshoes, we were guided through wooded paths and across hushed open meadows bathed in moonlight. No flashlights needed. Just the light of the moon.

Two hours later, tired but happy, we headed back to my house for a soak in the hot tub and some delicious Thai soup.

God I love ski season.