moving along

Went to a BJJ class on Monday, Muay Thai last night.  My knee is getting better.  Still a little sore, and makes me nervous that it might be vulnerable to a particular type of rarely used rotation.  Could be fine until I try to move it a certain way, and it's suddenly not.  I can't figure out if I worry too much or too little.  Certainly feels like improvement for now.

Met with an academic counselor yesterday to talk about my situation and what they might be able to do to help me keep it together and get back on track.  I'm not sure, but I like that they're trying.  Failed my classes last semester, but I'm registered for another 7 credits and going back to class on Tuesday.

My father's been doing well with the chemo.  He seems to be handling it well, and since they're now talking about surgery, maybe there have even been some signs that it's working.  He's still at the beginning of it though, just got through the second of six sessions.  He has a surgery consultation in Boston in three weeks.  I'll be heading back to visit him for another few days to make the trip with him.

My first bhut jolokia is just starting to ripen.   

a like

I think a lot about what it means to like people.  How do these human relationships work?  It doesn't help that the word is such a vague simple way of covering something so complicated.  Bear in mind, even breathing is complicated if you understand the physiology of it.  We're just not wired to experience it that way.  We're wired to be pretty much oblivious.

A big chunk of it has to do with enjoying a person's company.  That is, to enjoy the experience of being in their presence.  For any number of reasons.  We might also like a person's character, like this or that about them, but that's different from enjoying a conversation.  That's a matter of chemistry.  Dopamine, oxytocin, and whatever else.  Not only our own, but the indirect chemistry of how my serotonin and cortisol levels affect yours.

Some facets of this are so simple, and yet oddly difficult in practice.  If someone makes us happy, we're a lot more likely to like them.  Making other people happy though is tricky.  One might say we should just be ourselves, but that's beside the point.  Being yourself is going to make some people more happy than others.  It's also a nonsense concept.  We are the product of circumstances.  There is no self to be, just an intricate confluence of variables at this moment in time.

It's taken me a long time to come to terms with the fact that I don't like people, largely because I'm too neurotic to enjoy being around them.  It's simple chemistry therein to feel that way, but it's hardly something I can blame others for.  It's not that I don't like people, per se.  It just takes a lot for me to trust anyone enough that I don't prefer to be alone.

It sucks going through life preferring to be alone.  I'm getting used to being around people more, but still a long way to go.

cynical

Most people don't say they're depressed.  They say other people are jerks or the world is mean or whatever.  It's the same thing.  The more neurochemically well endowed mind pays more attention to the positives.  It doesn't matter whose fault the negatives are when that's not where most attention goes. 

Sounds like it should be an easy enough thing to adjust.  Therapies like CBT certainly try, but all that's beside the point.  It's a lot more normal than most people understand.  Some are better than others at handling the world being mean.  Sometimes the world is really fucking mean.  In real life, it's all about the complex interactions of our resilience and our traumas.  Huge numbers of people are clearly miserable, but we don't call it depression.

On one hand, there's this notion that Major Depression is an illness inherent to the individual.  Due to faulty biochemistry or psychology, but for most of my life, the conversation has been steered away from blaming circumstances.  All sorts of damage has been done due to reductive and misguided blame, but given the wider picture, the pieces generally fall into place.  We are the way we are, for all sorts of reasons, and sometimes it's very depressing.

The illness model isn't wrong, per se.  There's a physiological component to it.  Like with anything else, these systems can malfunction and be problematic in themselves, but this is just a factor in it all.  The chemical imbalance being one factor I'd been overcoming to some extent, but life's a bitch.  Injuring my knee meant losing a central pillar of how I'd been doing that.  A few weeks, maybe a month, I've been able to handle, but now it's been so long I have all this anxiety about going back, too.

I've failed my classes last semester, and it was supposed to be an extra light semester, because I wasn't doing that well to begin with and needed the break.  The whole year hasn't been going so well, really.  I was scraping by, until the knee giving out.  I'm thinking of giving up on the school idea and trying to figure something else out.

My father has about a thirty percent chance of beating the cancer thing, from what I can tell.  Could be worse, he was lucky to catch it relatively early, but it's still pretty bad.

I'd love to be the sort of person who can say life is going great, but seems I'm too depressed for that.