Which is probably why I’d never heard of it. It’s hard going, especially at first, and though the book is not long, there are not many characters, and the few events take place over about three weeks’ time, it’s taken me about two weeks to finish it. Will Self later wrote a novel called The Book of Dave, also many years post-apocalypse, written in a dialect developed from a depressed London cabbie, and I haven’t managed to finish it yet (though I will). The religion in the book is based on the cabbie’s journal, a brilliant idea. Years before I heard of this book, I thought of writing a post-apocalyptic story in which various groups of survivors have each managed to hold onto or find one book from one section of a bookstore: the diet section. One group, the Atkinsians, are at war with the people on the other side of the hill, who follow the Law of the South Beach. That’s about as far as I got. If anyone reading this would like to write that story, please do; I’d love to read it.

Anyway. The story of Riddley Walker follows a young man, living in a sort of Iron Age Kent, as he puzzles out the meaning of the local religion. This is based on chemistry and physics as well as on the only surviving fragment of pre-disaster writing, a short piece on the legend of Saint Eustace, a medieval painting in Canterbury Cathedral. The Saint Eustace, or Eusa people –

Let me interject here. The made-up dialect is rich in rewards for those inclined to play with language. For example, Eusa could be just a rendering of Eustace, or it could stand for USA, where nuclear weapons were first developed, or it could be a bastardization of Jesus, or it could mean used to, or a number of other interpretations. This is part of what makes the book slow reading.

The Eusa people seem to be feeling their way back to an understanding of nuclear fission, while the secretive dyers and charcoal burners have passed down a recipe in song for making gunpowder. And the whole thing revolves around puppet shows, including Punch and Judy.

It’s mind-bending, but it’s what I call a true story, meaning it’s made up (obviously) but what it’s talking about is fundamental Truth. In the end, it’s a meditation on our place in the universe, and on power and human nature. It’s very similar in that theme to A Canticle for Liebowitz, by Walter Miller, Jr. (1960). As one of the characters says to Riddley Walker,

“Riddley you know as wel as I do if you put 1 figger on your right han and a nother on your lef the 1 wil go agenst the other some how some time.”

Give a man a stick, he’ll whack another man with it. If he finds a rock, he’ll use that. Human society will always be driven to create bigger and better ways to kill each other. War is in our nature. But is it our nature? Individuals can transcend it, but can we do it as a species?

Remains to be seen. For some reason I’m faintly optimistic, or I suppose I wouldn’t have become a Buddhist. And like all frustrated idealists, I’m cynical as well.

The same character says, shortly before making the above point, “Riddley do you think theres hoap of any thing?” And Riddley replies, “Theres new earf on the barrens all the time.” He’s referring to the soil and growing things slowly, very slowly, encroaching on the blasted plain that surrounds the nuked Canterbury.

Or maybe he’s referring to the slow changes that can transform mankind.

Which way hurts more, when you lose her? I know which one I’d rather have. Even if it does hurt more in specific ways, I would rather have had a chance to know her and be shaped by her. I don’t even know what I’m missing, having lost her so young. But it’s a grass-is-always-greener thing.

Several of my friends have had babies recently, within the past couple of months. One of my closest friends had a baby in France, where she lives now. The baby came five or six weeks early, which she’s made light of but which sounds like kind of a big deal to me. They had to stay in the hospital for the first few weeks till he could feed properly, though he wasn’t in an incubator or anything like that. I spoke to my friend on the phone one day.

I love her no matter what her mood or state of mind; as I said, she’s one of my closest friends, and I don’t say that lightly. But talking to her that day was like talking to the Platonic ideal of her. She was herself, utterly and completely, magnified by a thousand. The highs were higher, the lows lower. One minute we were talking about the babies on the preemie ward, and the anxious parents, and we talked about how sad it was there. We got very sad. Then the next minute she was telling me about how the grandparents were planning a visit, and how this, the first grandson, may as well have been the Sun King himself returned to earth, and we laughed and laughed. She laughed so much, in a way I’d rarely heard her just let go and be merry. It was marvelous. Motherhood is agreeing with her, and it’s a good thing to see.

Another close friend of mine came to stay recently, and we talked about her experience with the births of her two children. I wasn’t around when they were born; this is a friend from college and we’d temporarily lost touch. She told me that, as soon as they brought her the baby, both times, she fell totally and completely in love as soon as she saw them.

I know this doesn’t always happen. There’s post-partum depression, and lots of other factors, and there must be times when the hormones just don’t kick in and the poor woman is left with this helpless yet extremely demanding person they cannot get away from. I can’t imagine how awful that must be.

This motherhood thing is fraught. I get that it changes your life; it should change your life. I believe there’s nothing more important than being responsible for the care of another human being, particularly an infant or a child. But I also agree with people who say that this mother’s day thing kind of reinforces a bullshit idea, that a woman who is a mother is better than a woman who is not. These friends of mine who are mothers are pretty awesome. But they were before, and they still would be if they’d chosen a different path.

Women are having fewer babies these days, I’ve been learning. I know more women who have chosen not to have children than women who’ve had them, though of course since I’ve chosen not to have kids myself, that’s not unusual. I think this is a good thing. Women are having fewer babies because fewer of them die in infancy or childhood, and fewer of them are needed for hard labor to support the family. Children should be wanted and loved by people who can care for them. But there’s lots of work for all of us, good work, and raising a child is not necessarily the only or the best thing an individual can contribute.

A person is not more or better when they have a child. Except to the child.

Hang in there, folks.

All kinds of things occur to a person. You can’t help what thoughts occur to you; all you can do is keep yourself from acting on thoughts that are unacceptable, such as, the desire to kill someone who’s hurt you in a relationship. The thoughts themselves are not under your conscious control. That I recognized this early in life made it easier, in a way, for me to do zazen or sitting meditation. I know I can’t stop the thoughts from coming; what I can do is stop myself from grabbing onto them.

All of this effort to be honest, though, may very well be a contributing factor in my lifelong, chronic depression. 

Have you heard this? Countless studies have proven that non-depressed people lie to themselves way more than depressed people do. Depressed people are far more likely to report, for example, that they are average drivers; most non-depressed people will claim to be above-average, though this is statistically impossible. Successful people, like the best athletes for example, are especially good at self-deception. They have to be. “I’m the best. I’m going to win. Nobody can beat me.” That kind of thinking is way more likely to help you win the race than “I’m only slightly above average; many of these people are better than I am” – although that may be true. Fair enough.

I enjoy listening to a science program from WNYC called Radiolab, which I highly recommend, and they discuss all of this in the show called Deception, which you can listen to here. A pair of scientists came up with a list of embarrassing questions to ask people in order to get them to have two thoughts at once, so they could see what was happening to them physiologically. Radiolab has the questionnaire on their website here.

A few sample questions from the show:

• Have you ever enjoyed a bowel movement?
• Have you ever thought of committing suicide to get back at someone?
• Have you ever fantasized about raping, or being raped by, someone?

The questions each break some kind of taboo, yet the assumption is that, at least at some point, every person has had such thoughts. These admissions are so embarrassing that most people would have trouble not only admitting the truth to another person, but they might not even be able to acknowledge the truth to themselves. I, of course, had no trouble answering in the affirmative, every time.

They’ve used this questionnaire in many, many studies, and invariably come up with the same results. People who lie to themselves are more successful, happier, better at business, and better at working in teams. I believe it.

However, those who answer the questionnaire honestly tend to be slightly more depressed than others. Depressed people lie less.

Here’s a quote from the show, from one of the authors of the Self-Deception Questionnaire, Harold Sackeim of Columbia University:

“They see all the pain in the world, how horrible people are with each other, and they tell you everything about themselves, what their weaknesses are, what terrible things they’ve done to other people, and the problem is they’re right. And so, maybe the way that we help people is to help them be wrong…. We’re so vulnerable to being hurt that we’re given the capacity to distort as a gift.”

That’s their answer. If people who see the world as it truly is are depressed, we need to teach these people to lie to themselves.

My response to that answer is probably a typical depressed person’s realistic response: that’s pretty depressing. But can we just look for a moment at where all these so-called successful, happy, self-deceiving people have gotten us? How good do you think those guys at Goldman Sachs are at lying to themselves? How about the folks at BP? Or politicians? Or that anti-gay bigot who was just exposed as a massive hypocrite? Or those responsible for any number of terrible events and situations?

My answer to this problem is the complete opposite. While I have learned that a certain amount of self-deception can give me more confidence, I don’t want to get in the habit of lying to myself. I’d rather be able to see the world as it truly is, and see the sadness that results, and not be incapacitated by it. Maybe it’s better to see the truth, and still be able to act. Maybe that’s a better goal than merely producing more “successful” people.

Maybe we need to reevaluate what we mean by “success.”

And maybe, just maybe, there are quite a few people in this world who need to learn how to stop lying.

A woman is running from a tiger that’s chasing her. She runs through the woods until she gets to the edge of a cliff. The tiger is still behind her, so she climbs down a vine. The tiger reaches the top of the cliff and paces back and forth, licking its chops. Midway down the cliff, hanging onto the vine, she sees another tiger below her, pacing back and forth, licking its chops. As she’s hanging there, two mice come out and start gnawing on the vine. She tries to shoo them away, but they won’t go. 

Just then she sees, growing out of the face of the cliff in front of her, a wild strawberry. She picks it and eats it. It’s delicious.

Some interpretations of the story are simply that, when your life is in danger, life never tastes sweeter. While that’s true, I think that reading entirely misses the point. This story, of course, being a Buddhist story, is about being in the moment.

The tiger at the top may represent the pain of the past, the tiger at the bottom the worries of the future; the precarious vine may symbolize the stresses of the now, and the mice signify the passage of time. In the midst of life, be present enough to notice the strawberry and enjoy its sweetness. I read one interpretation that said the answer lies in hanging on and reaching out, as the woman on the cliff hangs onto the vine and reaches out to the strawberry. I like that. But I don’t know that this story – or any zen story – is supposed to be taken as advice. It’s just an observation of the way things are.

So many of these stories, or the interpretations of them, seem to be about seeking pleasure, though. It’s a part of modern Buddhism that bugs me. So many people apparently interpret the teachings as encouragement to seek the pleasurable, strawberry-enjoying moments, as if that were the goal. It’s not a bad goal, and it’s certainly a better one than religions that teach hatred and intolerance. But one of the things that rings truest for me about Buddhism is that pleasure and pain are both illusions. Sometimes I get the feeling, from reading contemporary Buddhist articles, that people think you’re not really in the moment unless you’re feeling pleasure. I don’t get that.

As a person whose body doesn’t necessarily produce enough chemicals for feelings of happiness even when they’re warranted, I would much prefer if the story were told like this:

A woman is caught on the face of a cliff between two hungry tigers. As she’s hanging there, on the mouse-chewed vine, she notices a fossil embedded in the rock in front of her. She rubs it with her finger and examines it more closely. Hm, interesting, she thinks.

I don’t know if it matters what the thing-in-the-moment is. It would be a different story, though, if the thing noticed were something painful, say a splinter under her fingernail. Or if it were a dead pigeon, or a winning lottery ticket. I think, in order to convey what I believe the story is trying to convey, the object noticed has to be more or less emotionally neutral.

But here’s what makes me love this story: According to Thomas Cleary, D.T. Suzuki changed the ending of the story because he thought it wouldn’t appeal to westerners. In the original version, every element is there, except for one difference – the berry turns out to be deadly poison.

I love that.

What does it mean? Well, grasshopper. Maybe it means that life sucks, and then you eat a poison strawberry and you die. Or that life will kill you, whether you live it or not. Or that, when you’re stressed out, eating for comfort is a bad idea.

Or maybe it means that taking refuge in sensual experience is an illusion.

Or even more simply: don’t get distracted.

It’s hard to explain what I mean by this. I don’t mean the American “keep your eye on the ball” thing. Maybe “don’t be seduced by illusion” comes closer. That’s how it is with a koan, and all these zen stories are koans, stories or questions meant to provoke an awakening. There is no correct response, apart from that.

I kind of hate birthdays, but not for the reasons you might think. I don’t even much like other people’s birthdays, and can never remember the dates. I don’t think anyone in my family has ever received a birthday card from me on time, and I seldom buy them for friends. I feel guilty about this, because I know other people do like birthdays. I just really, really don’t.

It’s not about aging. I’ve never wanted children, so I’m not worried that some kind of clock is running out. I have never considered myself pretty, though experience suggests that there’s something attractive about me, and its influence seems to wane over time. This is annoying, in that I’m used to being able to provoke positive reactions with light flirting, but hardly devastating. I’m just not girly enough to care. Mostly it’s a relief to become invisible to men, frankly, at least to the kind of men who overtly notice women.

I don’t mind getting old. I love the feeling of knowing more than I used to. I don’t know how wise I am, but I’m certainly not as stupid as I used to be. There’s a lot of satisfaction in that. Every year I read more books, have more experiences, meet more people, know my friends better. It’s a good thing.

But I’m afraid of dying, so having that number – my age – go up by 1 on this day makes me a little uncomfortable. It’s a vivid reminder that the clock is always ticking, and there’s only one way this story can end. On the other hand, I used to be terrified of dying, so perhaps I’m making progress. Since my main goal in life is to ensure that the moment of my death is not full of horror and regret, I suppose how I feel about each birthday depends on how I think I’m doing. This year I feel pretty good, looking forward to going back to school, and learning a lot.

For a few years I went big for my birthday, and invited all my friends to share an experience all or most of us had never had before. Once I treated everyone to an evening in the Tactile Dome at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Another time, I took everyone to a firing range – that was interesting.

One year we all went to a restaurant that featured flamenco dancing, which I’d never seen in real life. Unfortunately some people I knew from work took off without paying, and then a few other people didn’t put in enough, and the whole thing turned into a hideous mess. I was outside smoking to relieve the stress and missed the dancing altogether. I wish I could’ve just paid the whole bill myself, but I was temping at that point and couldn’t afford it. That may have been the last time I did anything on that scale for my birthday. It still makes me cringe to think about it.

Although my friends saved the evening not only by paying the bill, but by presenting me with a birthday cake in the shape of a coffin. This amazed and confused the restaurant staff and remains the best birthday cake I’ve ever had. What could be more perfect?

Normally, though, I can’t stand the whole cake-and-candles ritual thing. Cake is all well and good, but please, don’t get me started on the Birthday Song. What am I, five? I hate being the center of attention that way. I even hated it when I was a kid.

One of my closest friends sings me “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” every year as a compromise.

I hate opening presents, too. I get overwhelmed by a sense of obligation I know can never be satisfied. (I’ve worked on this, but it’s no good.) Last night two friends took me out after work and treated me to beer, pool, and a cupcake, and I swear I just about wept with gratitude at their thoughtfulness. It was precisely what I needed.

What I do like about my birthday is that it marks the beginning of an upswing in my mood. The stressful grind of the holidays is followed, for me, by my least favorite anniversaries. I was raped at the end of January, and my mother and my brother both died in February; my mother died a week before my fifth birthday. No wonder I don’t like to make a big fuss. I get so depressed in February now, especially since my brother died, that I can’t even begin to make birthday plans, and couldn’t stand it if someone else made them for me – I don’t need the pressure.

I wish I lived in a culture where birthdays aren’t acknowledged after, say, your 18^th (with special allowance made for 21, perhaps?), but now I’m being a wet blanket. Now that it’s here, I feel good. February’s over, I have friends, and as I like to say when I’m feeling bleak about life:  at least nothing in my immediate vicinity’s on fire. Including birthday candles. Things could be a lot worse.

Time to get ready to go out, shoot some more pool, and get a little tipsy. I’m actually looking forward to this. But they’d better not have gotten me a cake.

How do you feel about your birthday?

History is thick with cultures and religions that believed in apocalypse, and not just us wacky westerners (google Hopi Prophecy if you’re into that kind of thing). Doesn’t that make it something ingrained in us, perhaps something genetic?

I don’t believe in an apocalypse gene (though I might be persuaded to endorse an apocalypse virus or bacteria). To me, it’s common sense. Many feel that the end is near because the end is near. There have been many ends, many communities and whole civilizations that have been utterly destroyed or so changed as to be unrecognizable. It may not be about to happen, but the possibility is always close by. Plague, natural disasters, nuclear devastation, invasion, genocide. Now that so many of us crowded into cities, with mass food production and nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, the unknown threat of climate change, viruses able to mutate faster than we can keep up with them, the end is no further off than it ever has been.

If there is something biological going on, the rationale for it might be something like this: isn’t it better to be prepared for the worst? Those who trip blithely on, believing that all of this – this culture, this life, whatever it is – will last forever are perhaps doomed not to survive to reproduce, or at least not in such great numbers as those of us who are peering at the sky and stockpiling food and water. Disaster research shows that the people who do best in an emergency situation – a plane crash, an earthquake – are the ones who’ve spent time picturing themselves doing what needs to be done. That’s why I always pay attention during the safety announcement on the airplane; it might not be enough to save me, but ignoring it sure isn’t going to help. Talking and thinking about the apocalypse lets us all practice for disaster.

This interpretation of apocalypse leads me inevitably to that most personal of end times, one’s own death. We’re all going to die. Isn’t that also, in a way, the end of the world? Maybe the more we believe that death, as the end of ego, is a terrible devastation, the more interested we are as a people in the idea of global apocalypse. Doesn’t it feel better to imagine that the world might end with you, or vice versa? Sometimes I just hate the idea of dying simply because I’ll miss the rest of the story. If only the world, the story, and I could all end at the same time.

So many religions portray death as an apocalypse in the biblical sense of a “revelation,” a difficult and painful process succeeded by eternity in paradise, but only if you deserve it. This, of course, has been abused by many people throughout history, as “prophets” claiming insider knowledge of God’s plans have convinced people to follow them in order to be “saved.” This is just an example of man’s propensity to exploit the fears of others for his own advantage. Obviously it works, or there wouldn’t be so many religions based on it – including all the varieties of Christianity.

Perhaps apocalypse myths are humanity’s collective way of contemplating its own death – or its suicide. The way we live now, for example, cannot last. It’s not sustainable. This lifestyle is engendering changes that will bring about an environmental apocalypse for mankind.

This writer equates Christian “prophets” and modern day climate change scientists, as if studying objective evidence that anyone can see if they just look, were just the same as some guy telling you that God spoke to him and gave him the date of the Last Day. It’s just another way to deny the big lifestyle changes that are coming, that are necessary. But maybe we should be taking another look at the original meaning of revelation.

God is coming, and He’s pissed.

We know we’re guilty. I can accept that interpretation. We are guilty. Environmentally guilty, anyway. God is coming, and She’s pissed.

And culturally guilty? Sure. There’s always someone being exploited, or neglected, or abused, and are we doing enough – or indeed, anything – to change or prevent that?

I believe the perpetuation of religions that anticipate apocalypse is cultural, not biological. We yearn for an easier life. Maybe everything will be better after we get through this mess we’re in.

That, to me, is the essence of the apocalypse obsession: The reset. Starting over. To hell with all this, let’s do something else. Surely everyone on earth has felt that way at one time or another.

I know I’ve been fantasizing about The End since I was about thirteen years old, when I first began to apprehend the kind of world I was living in, and the kind of life in front of me. Particularly lately, I’m ready for a big change in my life, and there’s a lot of anxiety about what that’s going to look like. I’d rather do it without the devastation of apocalypse, but one way or another it might not be up to me. I hope that, whatever happens, I can make something good out of it.

The world itself is in dire need of a big change. The whole system needs a major overhaul, and while I’m not eager for massive death and destruction, I also know that major change won’t happen unless it has to. People don’t like change and they won’t do it unless they don’t have a choice. So we basically have to follow our current course of action to its logical conclusion, and I do think that’s what’s happening. It’s not going to be pretty.

And that’s the lesson of apocalypse. It’s the worst-case scenario, the warning. The big or else. It’s the threat that’s always there, and the hope that’s right behind it. The knowledge that we’re really not doing our best, the guilt that goes along with that, and the determination to do better.

When will we ever learn? Maybe the next time around.

Seitan is vital wheat gluten (so poison for those with gluten intolerance), as unappetizing a phrase as it is a concept. It’s pretty unappetizing for most of the preparation, too. But oh my god, it totally rocks!

I am so excited about this. At last, a protein that acts like meat (but isn’t), and is really easy to make! If I can do it, I swear, anybody can. I present the following for seitan newbies who might be wondering if this is hard to do, or for those who’ve started and are now wondering if something’s gone horribly wrong.

I followed Mark Bittman’s recipe and instructions, basically.

• 1 cup vital wheat gluten
• 3/4 cup water
• 1/2 cup soy sauce
• 6 cups vegetable stock
• all the courage you can muster

Put 1 cup of vital wheat gluten in a bowl, and add 3/4 cup water.

Mix together. You might as well use your hands right away, you’re going to have to knead this stuff anyhow. It comes together almost instantly into a sort of squishy, rubbery ball that you can’t believe is supposed to be food. I should have taken a photo at this point, but I didn’t know what was going to happen. It’s an unattractive, grayish-yellow color, maybe about the size of a softball.

Knead for 5 minutes. I watched part of a documentary on the Spanish Influenza while I did this.

Leave it in the bowl and cover it with a cloth for, Bittman says, at least 20 and not more than 30 minutes. I’ve seen recipes on the web that contradict this, though – I suppose it alters the consistency somehow, depending on how long you take with this or that step. Anyway, these numbers worked for me.

While it’s “resting,” make the simmering broth. I used Bittman’s Dark Simmering Liquid recipe, which is just 1/3 cup soy sauce plus 6 cups vegetable stock (I like Better than Bouillon). Combine in a large pan that can be covered.

When the 20 minutes are up, cut the weird, rubbery spongy thing in half, and try to make two “logs.” I failed miserably at this. The stuff is so elastic, it kept shrinking back no matter how I stretched it, though I admit I was afraid to stretch it too much. This may be why mine turned out kind of dense. Lay the two “logs” or whatever shape you come up with in the liquid. Bring it to a boil, then turn it down so it’s just simmering. Cover and leave it for about an hour, coming back to turn the “logs” a couple of times.

I went back to my documentary and forgot to turn mine until half an hour in. When I raised the cover on that pan, I stepped back with a cry of shock. The two grayish-yellow lumps had ballooned up into two great, yellowish-gray, misshapen, floating masses that collapsed slightly as the air hit them. Still not at all something you’d want to eat.

Seitan in the pot. Ew.

Looks like a pair of moldy sponges, right? It didn’t smell that great, either. I was frightened and a little discouraged. But I let it finish simmering for its hour, then allowed it all to cool in the liquid while I went to the store for some onions. When I got back, I stuck I fork in one and cut off about half of it, making a face the whole time, and sliced it up.

Sliced seitain - looks like food!

Hm. Actually starting to look like food now. Doesn’t that look kind of like chicken or pork? So I fried it up in my $5 IKEA wok, using another Bittman recipe (I love love love his How to Cook Everything Vegetarian), and it looked like this:

Wok with seitan. You know you want to.

Looks like meat! Smells like meat! I started to get excited.

And here’s my stir fry, all put together. It’s just carrots, onion, celery, brown rice, and…

Stir-fried seitan, yum!

… delicious morsels of seitan! Seriously, I cannot believe how good it tasted. I would have thought I was eating leftover barbecued chicken. I don’t know where the barbecue flavor came from, but it was yummy. And “leftover” because, like I hinted above, my seitan is a little denser and chewier than it’s probably supposed to be (maybe I over-kneaded it), but I still loved it. My only regret is that I didn’t put more in that stir fry.

The idea of eating “vital wheat gluten” still kind of grosses me out, and handling those spongy brain-like masses currently floating in their simmering liquid in the refrigerator is pretty distasteful, but the result is completely worth it. I just might be a seitan worshiper. (I can’t help it! What do you want me to do?)

Next time I’ll try that famous baked version that’s around the web – supposed to taste like pepperoni. I can’t wait! Have you tried seitan or anything else new lately?

I’ve had an epiphany. I’m going back to school for Environmental Studies, and I want to be involved in sustainability planning for communities. Ta da!

Only took me twenty years to figure that out. I’ve never been particularly interested in anything specific as a job, except writing novels. And I certainly don’t give a crap about a career just for the sake of a career. Associate manager to manager to senior manager to associate director to director to senior director – who cares? Do any of those people actually enjoy what they do every day?

People care about the money, of course, and the status. I don’t care about status, in fact in most cases the higher up a person is in a corporation the less I respect them, since I’ve worked in that area long enough to know what it takes to advance that high. And it’s way more important to me to be interested in what I do, and to feel like I’m doing some good or at least no harm to the world, than to just make as much money as I can.

So, what to do?

Finance – vomit. Energy – blech. Manufacturing – do we manufacture anything in this country any more? Medicine, hm. Too much science, too much one-on-one with people. Same with therapy, which I’ve seriously considered. Or teaching – could I get up and perform in front of people every day? I don’t think so.

I would love to help women, children, or animals that have been abused, but emotionally, I couldn’t do it. I cry at the commercials. No help at all.

My most recent chosen profession has been web development. IT is a good field to go into if you hate computers and people. Even if you went into IT because you love dinking around with hardware or you have a passion for programming, you’ll end up in management. And as anyone who’s ever worked for other people knows, rare is the manager who actually likes people and knows how to inspire them. It’s certainly not a job requirement.

I suspect it’s like that in most fields. You go into the industry because you like working with whatever it is – clothing, books, education, numbers, design, programming, etc. – and you end up in management, because if you’re not moving up the ladder, you’re a loser. And once you’re in management, you’re no longer working with whatever it was you liked in the first place. Nonprofits are no different from corporations in this respect, though I suppose if you’re passionate enough about the issue or the industry, it doesn’t matter to you.

I’ve never been that passionate about anything, unless I’m too passionate. I could never work in publishing, for example. I love books so much, but working in publishing would be something like a person who loves steak getting a job at a slaughterhouse. No thanks.

Academia is similar, to me. I can see how it’s a lot of fun to dissect other people’s literary work down to subatomic levels, but does it do good for the world in general? Plus, academia is just as competitive as the corporate sector, if not more so. And there’s the teaching thing, too. Not for me.

Before my career got derailed, I was moving toward usability. To help the web become easier to navigate for everyone, that’s a good job.

Unfortunately my “career,” such as it was, got derailed by 9/11. I’d just moved to NYC days earlier, got laid off a few months later, with no contacts and no experience in the city, which was now in a deep recession. My field was way over-saturated, outsourced, unstable, yet still demanded that its players relearn everything, every couple of years. I could never get enough work to keep up my skills or pay for classes, so every year I’ve fallen further behind. If I were enough of a graphic designer or a programmer to be a strong competitor, I would be okay, but I’m not. And, sadly, I’ve become less interested in usability, too. In what’s starting to look like a permanent recession, no one’s hiring anyone simply to make their web site easy to use, yet a lot of education is needed to learn to do it well.

And it doesn’t do enough good in the world to inspire me.

But I can’t just work at a bookstore, my other job. Talk about a dead end. It’s been killing my body and my soul for the last couple of years, but my mind has just been churning in circles.I don’t want to be a manager, or work in the head offices. What should I do? Leave the city? Take some programming classes? I’m sick of freelancing, too, and that’s what most programmers are nowadays. Go back to school? I haven’t wanted to go back to school. I feel like I’ve done that, and I need to move forward. Of course, I would do anything if I could only pick a goal. But what goal? What should I do? What should I do?

My thinking has become kind of frantic this past year.

I just kept going on, doing my best, when I can, to figure out why I’m alive and what I’m doing here. Watching the depression grow again. Ugh.

Trying to do the thing, I did NaNoWriMo again this past November, and wrote the first draft of an apocalyptic novel that’s been in my head for at least twenty years. It was so much fun, and turned out well enough that I decided to keep working at it. I’ve thrown myself into researching climate change, epidemiology, water issues, large scale environmental disaster, and have surprised myself by getting more interested, instead of burning out.

I even considered becoming a disaster relief worker, but I don’t think that’s a full time job. Also, I think that kind of work is physically demanding and requires a person to be away from home for weeks at a time. Hm.

I kept getting a vision of myself installing solar panels. So I started to look into that. I thought it would probably be handy to know a little bit about how electricity works, should the apocalypse come along, and I thought my classmates would be interesting – would I be the only woman, the only person my age? I wouldn’t care.

As I looked through the programs at each college in New York state, I kept seeing programs in environmental studies. And I found a great program at CUNY Hunter College. You can focus either on the science-y bits or on policy and management, which sounds boring but actually means “planning sustainable communities,” which is what, I realized, I want to do. Yay!

And as soon as I started talking about it, I found all kinds of advice and connections all around me – people who know people in the field who are willing to talk to me, or who can suggest certifications and so forth to get me started. Contacts, networking, mentoring – it’s all that stuff they tell you about in career advice books and articles, but I can use it now, because I have a goal at last.

What a difference it makes!

What’s interesting to me (and hopefully to others) about this process is the idea that action creates action. Even if you don’t know what to do, you have to keep doing something in order to make something else happen – a new idea, a new opportunity. Otherwise you might as well lie down and die, which tempts me at times, believe me. It’s transforming, to have a purpose. I’m even studying Algebra, in preparation for placement testing, and actually enjoying it.

That’s where I am today. I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say about this whole process. Wherever you are in your life, I wish you luck, and the energy to keep trying!

They’re depressed because they’ve seen a world that is beautiful, in which every living thing is connected and in harmony, and they’ve been reminded how far they are from living that way.

I went to avatar-forums.com and had a look at the discussion there for myself. And you know what?

I like those people. They’re sweet, and they give me hope. Most of them have realized why they’re sad, why they’re going to see this movie over and over, and it’s not because it’s a beautiful dream. It’s because we have that reality right here on Earth, and we’re fucking it up.

We do live in a beautiful world in which everything is connected. Unfortunately, much of it has been thrown way out of balance by greed. In the film, the Na’vi fight off corporate mining interests with the help of the main character, but our own planet lost that fight a long time ago. If you haven’t noticed lately how much that sucks, it’s because you’re purposefully repressing it. Probably because it’s too depressing to think about.

If you’re suffering from post-Avatar depression, here are some things you can do:

• Get informed. Learn as much as you can about ecology, climate change, water resources, and even chemistry and physics if you can do it. Talk to people about it.
• Vote for ecologically sustainable practices, and vote against unsustainable practices. Act locally – pay attention to what’s going on in your community, and speak up. Call or write to your government representatives.
• Buy local food and products whenever possible. Do what you can in your own life to reduce your energy consumption.
• If you can, consider getting an energy audit for your home, and even installing solar panels or a wind turbine.
• Be kind. Live more simply. Continue to question your values.

“All I ever wanted was a single thing worth fighting for.”
- Jake Sully in Avatar

This isn’t about just installing curly lightbulbs and figuring we’ve saved the world. Part of the problem is the lack of ideas, or more accurately, the lack of people talking about the ideas. Look around for more, and come up with some of your own.

We are part of our environment. This isn’t my opinion, it isn’t some hippy-dippy bullshit, it’s reality. If you think it’s not true, please, try living in a vacuum. Be my guest.

Living as if we aren’t part of our environment means that we’re making it so – we’re exiling ourselves right out of existence. Either we do something about it, or we wait to die. And as much as you might hate the sound of it, “doing something about it” means realizing that we are our environment, we are all connected, and the way we live now does not work. Our one hope is to balance the earth in an equation that includes us and everything else.

And that we learn to do this before we get off the planet, and go ruin the rest of the universe.

Writers of articles on post-Avatar depression, and of course most of the comment-section peanut gallery, sneer at these people. It’s a movie, they say. It’s not real. Get over it.

I think it’s the cynics and sneerers that have something they need to get over. They’re so far removed from reality, they can’t even feel what’s missing.

So S. and I go into the cinema to see if there was anything else playing – the smell of popcorn was that tantalizing – but there’s nothing at the right time, and I’m ready to leave. S. eyes the staircase. “Let’s just go up here for a minute,” she says.

I’d never been to this theater before, but she’d been here lots of times, born and raised in the city. At the top of the stairs is a ticket-taker, so I hesitate. Nearby is another cinema worker, chatting on the phone. “Bathroom?” S. says, and the woman gestures. We walk right in.

Who knew you could do that?

I’m giddy, having snuck into the movies – I feel like a little kid as we’re walking down the main drag, past the popcorn concessions (gotta get some), past theater after theater. I’m trying to figure out what we’re going to see. S. is just heading for the bathroom – she really did have to go.

And suddenly we’re in the doorway of a movie, I can’t tell which one, but I have my suspicions as there are security guards and a guy waving a wand-style metal detector. S. is walking so purposefully, he assumes she belongs there. “You were here before, right?” he says, and waves her in. I ride her wake, trying not to screech with joy.

We’re in. And The Book of Eli is just starting.

We had to stand, but it’s just under 2 hours and we both work on our feet all day at the bookstore, so no sweat (my feet are much better these days).

Later she told me how she and a friend happened to walk past a theater downtown showing a premier of some big movie, and all the stars were there. She and her friend just walked right in. Saw the movie, saw the stars.

New York!