Another Way

What existential crises do androids face?
What's the point of life when it isn't?
Where's the motivation for anything when there's no biochemical reward?
What really matters if consciousness is bits?

I suppose if you cannot feel happiness, sadness is lost as well.
But then what drives you, beyond repair?

Can there be anything more than this?

This Week Blows

Yea. That's basically all I really wanted to say. Monday I had an exam. And sure, whatever, I did fine, some may say better, than usual. But I wanted, nay, needed a miracle--and I didn't get one.

Monday night I got to watch Star Wars with some friends, which was entertaining. Blu-ray is nice. But it wasn't amazing. Later, went for drinks at Firkin, which is a nice place, and the drinks are always delicious. But not amazing.

Tuesday I went to Traffic Court, and like a scared idiot decided to plead "Not Guilty." So now I have to go back to court on March 6th. And I will probably need a lawyer. I don't know anything about how this is supposed to work. Justice is intentionally confusing, I am sure.

I wanted to stand there, in front of the judge, my back turned on at least fifty other people with various offenses. I wanted to express disappointment in myself for the wrong I committed which in my mind wasn't very wrong at all. Because I like Illinois, I will pay your fines.

But then the judge, with short blonde hair, asked me why I was there, didn't wait for me to answer her, looked at the sheet in front of her, and said, "Speeding? In a school zone? Have you talked to the Lake Bluff prosecutor?" Her tone implied that I was in more trouble than I had thought. And as I stood there, I wanted to rage. I couldn't draw in enough breathe to yell. I asked if this offense would show up on a criminal background check. She went on a short rave about how she had never done a criminal background check and how was she to know--

I had spent forty-five minutes in this room, watching people stand in front of her. I had watched a handful of young men in khakis with their proud, defensive parents--as if parents never leave the sides of their male spawn--get mandated to go to traffic school, with a nice little smile. I had watched two older men, who spoke little enough English to require a translator, be told that they had committed a class A felony by driving on a suspended license, which could justify them having to pay $7500 in fines or spending 365 days in jail. One of them seemed okay with that. The other seemed genuinely horrified that something of this magnitude could happen. A shifty looking kid with longer hair had driven 75 miles per hour in a 35 miles per hour zone. His rich parents had to pay $300.


I had driven 37 miles per hour in a 35 miles per hour zone that was really a 20 miles per hour zone because it was a school day and there was a cop trawling the street. But there were no children still at the school--they had all gone home. The cop had written up my ticket, and mentioned that the citation had occurred at 3 pm, even though it had happened at 3:08 pm.


Fear. My voice picked up. I was probably much louder than I needed to be. I stuttered a bit. "I don't... do not want to plead guilty to this."

Really, I should have said something like this: "This trumped up charge is a defamation of my character, and the mere claim that I would speed past children is both intolerable to my constitution and personal libel. Causing any harm to children, directly or indirectly, is entirely antithetical to my character. I refuse to pay fines or jail time or have my name tarnished because this cop wanted to write a ticket--a ticket she improperly filled out. I refuse to pay fines to a state that has horrible laws that make it easier to--through civic means--disadvantage the already underprivileged. Most importantly, I refuse to help fund the justice system in my local area, an area that saw a man beaten to death by police within the last year, an incident that his mother reported on as such:


"They would not have beaten a dog as badly as the way they beat my son."


Worst of all, it was February, National Black History Month. And as this is the biggest wrong I have ever been accused of, perhaps I began to irrationally fear that I was witnessing the beginnings of my disenfranchisement. I am more American than most white Americans, and you can take my rights away when you tell me that my ancestors didn't mean anything to this country. The Midwest would be crap without the influx of German farmers.

So I walked out of the court with another court date ready to go. Because sure, I love spending time dealing with a justice system that even my lawyer-to-be older sister claims "is magical."

Meanwhile, I've had to deal with people actually making fun of me. Almost constantly actually. About everything. Speeding in a school zone. Doing poorly in anatomy. Exaggerating the extent that I've hit people. I'm beginning to have panic attacks, reminiscent of when I--elementary school Elora--used to get bullied and no one would stand up for me because I had no friends at the time, and I'd end up just running away--from school, from home. I don't really have any good places to run away to now. But I guess I'll stay home from lecture tomorrow. Maybe I'll cry myself to sleep. In general, I have a rule that goes a little something like this: Once something has made you cry once, you have to get over it, because it made you cry. You can't give things that much power over you. The only problem is, I really don't know what's upsetting me the most. And I don't think I want to tell myself. Self-hypnosis aside, I don't know what to do and am truly horrified by the prospect of having to endure this kind of feeling for much longer. I feel crappy enough that I would actually enjoy being hugged right about now. Which is preposterous, because I hate hugging people almost as much as I dislike the overuse of cliches in popular literature.

All in all, it looks like my sadness stems from my helplessness. I seemingly can't control how well I do on exams. I can't control people's feelings about me or what they're willing to say to my face. I can't control or even understand our state's crazy moving violation laws. And now I can't even control my feelings. I'm a mess.

It is barely Thursday.

And this week blows.

Temporal Expansion -- Being Awake

It's been a long time since I've been awake this late and so intent on focusing. More than just focusing, actually succeeding in continual learning. I must have crossed an event horizon. Not helping my temporal expansion are two great fears that have been trailing me since childhood, making night time the worst time.

First, the fear that my life will always be this bleak because I can't learn like anyone else. I end up sounding smarter than I am. It fuels my ego to outwit people. I end up in situations where I don't belong. Honors math. Medical school?

Second, the fear that things have snuck into my house, my room, and that they will attack me as soon as I turn off all the lights. I have a lot of little hallucinations when I get this tired. I know that that's normal. My reactions are not supposed to be normal when I've been awake for twenty-two straight hours. What's not normal is how terrified I get by the thought that something unnatural may actually exist in my close proximity. I am a woman of science. My daydreams, night dreams, hallucinations, are not at all based in reality.

The last time I was awake at 4:23 in the morning, I was drunk. I was tired. I was useless.

No part of me wants to continue being useless.

Doc Apocalypse

Through the innervation of my pointer finger, I knew that I should pull my hand away from the electronic device. I couldn't take my eyes off the screen, however, and my finger wanted to manipulate the thing in some meaningful way. I was looking through the owner's gallery photos, saved for all this time. The memory from the thing had not been erased, but without wireless, the digital device was more perplexing than useful. The photos were sentimental. They weren't useful for identifying the wretch who had lost it.

After scrolling through all the photos, and then going back to look at them again, scanning with my eyes to find the location in each scene that I could have easily photoshopped myself in, I built up the courage to look through the person's files. I wanted to play a game; even something as simple as solitaire would have allowed me a feeling I had not felt in so many years. But this person favored presentations and music more than games. And they had poor taste in musicians.

So I was trying to open up a presentation file, simply titled "Anatomy." It was a powerpoint file. But I couldn't see a preview of it. Selecting the file only opened up a viewing program with a pesky dialogue window: "Application is Busy." This would persist for a while, before the dialogue window would change what it read to: "Application is up to date."

Then it would close. I kept pressing. Darien would have to recharge it for me. I kept tapping. I wanted to tap until the friction caused the screen to form a divot. I wanted to keep percussing its smooth surface until my finger developed a blood blister and then burst all over the evil reminder of what I once had.

I do not think I quite know how my life should be lived at this point in time. I am scared, worried, anxious--I am a young adult.

My negative ruminations make sense in this context. Even still I will attempt to keep this blog as positive and as peaceful as possible.

I write about diabetes. I write about depression. I write about failed attempts to be socially normal. I write about racism.

I should not try to write about anything else. I am an expert in nothing, but at least in these things I have been very observant.

Peripheral Neuropathy

Ischemia sizzles away at my nerves;
Continuous mortality makes me bold.

What I can give, no one deserves:
Clasp my hands, already cold.

I don't want to be a dick, but I kind of fucking love America.

Parts of my genetic material have been here for over 200 years, working on farms, shipping furniture up the Mississippi, settling down in the beautiful Midwest.

Parts of my genetic material have been here for about forty years, memorizing all of John F. Kennedy's speeches while still across the Atlantic Ocean in Nigeria.

I love America. Red, White, and Blue--these colors would be nauseating together unless I felt the way I do about this great country.

And I love Americans too. We have great potential; we have great freedoms. America is not perfect, and when I am really depressed about my life and the lives of those around me, I think we are never going to get back to the ideals we once held. But even on those days, I still recognize that Americans themselves can be amazing people.

But let me be a dick, and let me just say this: I hate people who want to volunteer in other countries. I know I shouldn't, and I know America will only be great in the ways it once was if we as Americans help other nations in need.

But I can't stand people who seem to think that America isn't hurting right now--people who think that their time is better served in "third world" countries. That pisses me off, and I'll give you three reasons why:

1. There is horrific amounts of poverty in this country. If I choose to believe all the random statistics sent to me through commercials (which I do), then one out of eight children in America are in a state of starvation. That's 12.5%. That is way too many children. You want to help people? There are plenty of people who need your help here.
2. Fun fact: America's biggest problem is how poorly distributed wealth is. Go to a third world country. Yes, go. Most people will be poorer than Americans, but there's one part of the sentence you really need to pay attention to: "most people." Even in the worst environments, where dictatorships and communism control most of the wealth, the majority of people will be living in similar situations. Misery loves company, right? People don't assume they are poor unless they have our western ideals of wealth superimposed on their lives: "Oh, Nicaragua doesn't have Wifi? Those poor savages." Do you want to be that person who is so shallow that they do not recognize happiness on a stranger's face? Who attempts to right situations that are not actually wrong?
And yes, some third world countries may have deplorable living situations, but I would argue that being poor in America, when you can see all the successes of the wealthy, is just as bad as not having Wifi to power your iPhone. We need to help other countries, true, but it always seems like people are trying to tell me that non-America countries need their attention much more than America.
3. Finally, and this kills me so much: When people tell me that they would much rather volunteer in an African country than in underserved American communities, all I can think of, and I keep saying it to myself, wanting to yell at them this question because I have no peace from it: "So you'd rather help Africans than African-Americans?"

Is it wrong for me to think this way? Potentially. But America deserves the respect and attention of other Americans. I am going to be living here for the rest of my life.

Neologism pt. 2

So today on the facebook, one of my high school acquaintances used the word "depresso" in a status update. That's a word I started using in high school to slant the word depression. If you're not depressed in high school, you're either doing something wrong or on way too many drugs. I am assuming she indeed picked up this expression from me, for which I am incredibly flattered. It is also possible that someone she knows now started employing the word, but that is less likely. The human language evolves much like living organisms. The likelihood of humans evolving identically but separately on two different worlds in our vast universe is impossible--which is, I must say, the largest error purported by Star Trek: The Original Series.

Regardless, I feel like reading Richard Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene," again. This book has the first mention of memes in the english language. Meme, like depresso, is a neologism. Neologisms fascinate me. I like making up words, I like using incorrect words in sentences. I have some type of aphasia. Or maybe I just l don't think before I say things. Either way, I wonder if something as trivial as meme creation could actually improve a person's quality of life.

How complicated is depression? Or is it as simple as the fact that you simply don't feel like you matter? I would say that helplessness, being in an existentialist rut, and self-loathing constitutes most of depression (I am not an expert; I don't know why I keep saying that I understand things when it is so clear to everyone else that I'm a loser).

Anyway, I'll just state a fact after rambling for two and a half paragraphs: it made me really happy that someone I haven't talked to in over four years used a word I had made up. I feel influential. It's a nice feeling. Thinking you don't matter is a really close minded opinion to take on world events.

And sure, depresso is basically one of the easiest words to make up, no real skill was involved, but still....

Family

We're all breaking at the seams
Oxidized by the daily affronts;
Daily disgruntlements--
Scattered sunlight digging into us.
We grip tight
But not tighter.
Hands will tear us;
Our lives in scrap piles will lack lust.
We dream of love's moments thunderous,
Rain moving alongside us.
And in weatheredness we understand
How incomplete our sadness:
Uncontrolled laughter has held us.
We controlled each pitch.
We never fear losing
What we are stitched to.

Coping Mechanisms

I have developed a large arsenal of mental strategies to manipulate my way out of depression. I've been honing them since I was thirteen, which, for all intensive purposes, is when my "depression" began. I will argue that I actually was first clinically depressed at age eight due to a number of issues beyond my control (birth order, race, elementary school), but that doesn't seem important. The five years in between that time was unremarkable. Regardless, below are some of my coping mechanisms. They may help someone. Or they may make you feel more "normal." If depression persists for more than 10 years, you should probably start taking medication. That is not as obvious as you may think.

1. Imaginary Friend
Okay, so this was actually something I started when I was 12. It became most apparent at morning swim practices. If you think it's okay to wake a 12 year old up at five in the morning, you are wrong. Sleep is important. Without sleep, even happy people will grow worrisome. Add on the stress of being in junior high and also wasting about five hours everyday in a pool, and you get an imaginary friend as a coping mechanism. My imaginary friend was a 5-8 year old named Kaori. She would basically be around for conversation at the natatorium when I wasn't face down in a freezing pool. I don't remember us having any interesting dialogue. It was just nice to know that someone around my own age was always around (For the most part, I was swimming with high schoolers when I was 12).

Kaori is a Japanese name. I picked it not because I had an affinity for Japanese culture but because I really liked the letters in the name, specifically the ratio of vowels to consonants. Depression increases in children with uncommon names. This is unfortunate for my own children, whose names have already been selected: Zeke, Zia, Quorra, and Quinn. Which brings me to my next coping mechanism:

2. My Potential Offspring
So when I was in high school, it started occurring to me that dying might actually be a smart plan. Once when I had been unable to move from my bed for an entire weekend, I began starting to plan out how I might kill myself.

Brief aside: I am no longer suicidal. Longer aside: Once in the eighth grade I told my history professor that I didn't like being alive. So they sent me to an emergency room, not too far from where I am currently going to Medical School. Regardless, they wanted to assess how set I was on killing myself. So the man/doctor/nurse asked me if I had any actual plans for how I would die. Elora Apantaku will always answer questions, whether or not she has the correct answer. When people ask me questions, I am loathe to say I do not know. I will always pretend to know, or seek to know, or tell you something with the clarification: "I guess." So of course I gave him an answer on how I would best like to die. Overdose on insulin. Fun fact: That would actually fucking suck. SO. MUCH. I hate thirteen year old Elora. Overdose on insulin? Why not just drown? Jesus Christ. Anyway...

But I did not get very far, because I started thinking about my future. And despite all my self loathing, I kept thinking that in all honesty, I might be a good mom. I actually might be a great parent. My own parents had set the bar so low that--at the time--it seemed the only thing I had to do to best both of them was teach all of my children how to tie their own shoes.

Genetically, I'm a mess. Besides my intelligence and athletic capability, I am a sucky human being. I have diabetes, depression, asthma, eczema, psoriasis, hyperlipidemia, hypertension, anemia, allergic reactions to exercising... but only after eating shellfish... Whatever. But I couldn't help think that it was a personal challenge to make my own children better than me. I probably did not need to face childhood depression, but that is for another angsty blog post. In conclusion, all I have to do is think about my four children, two sets of boy-girl twins, and I easily step away from thoughts of suicide. But that's really all it's good for. It doesn't really help me from being depressed. It just keeps me alive.

3. Little Elora
This coping mechanism is by far the easiest to bring to mind. Because I was a melancholic child, things can only get better. Whenever I'm having a day full of self-loathing, I just imagine that I could have gone back in time and sat down and had a chat with my younger, child self. It's easy to hate and blame yourself. It's slightly harder to hate and blame your child self--especially when your child self looks exactly like you except much smaller and much more innocent. Have fun trying to hate who you were. And keep in mind the fact that you, as a kid, were blameless. You became the person you, as a child, were. So can you keep blaming yourself for being meek and uninteresting? Non-confrontational? Pathetic? This is also how I find compassion for other people who have done horrible things. When you are talking to an adult, you assume everything is their fault. You forget that they act the way they were taught to act. Their most influential teachers were probably their parents. Parents suck. You don't know what they were like growing up. But you can assume that almost every child, except for the spawn of satan, will become either a good or bad person, not because of their own volition, but because they were guided that way by the people that raised them. This is why republican parents often have republican children, and racists breed more racist spawn. Religious families would be loathe to have an atheist at their dinner table. This viewpoint takes a very "nurture" side of the debate, one of the many disagreements I have with my mother is that she is set to believe that genetics is the reason behind everything--that just because she is smart and functioning means that we should be too. Disagree.

4. Cinema
Finally, when things are really really bad, but I know that they could easily be spun to be hilarious with a good enough soundtrack, I just imagine that my entire life is actually a movie. If things are really bad, I pretend it's a sitcom with a built in laugh track. Barring absolute tragedies, all the sadness in my life would actually be quite amusing. Which is why break ups and speeding tickets no longer make me depressed enough to cry my eyes out for hours on end. All the speeding tickets I've gotten have been pathetic. All the people I have ever dated (most of them) have been hilarious mismatches. You just don't realize those things when they have just happened. So take a step back, and if you have no one to talk to, imagine that what has just happened is playing out on a movie screen. You may feel like a loser, but film can spin anything. To those people in the audience, those imaginary people, you're a protagonist. A tragic hero. Comedic relief. You may not enjoy the fact that you're trudging along in depression for the first act, but hey! If this is Hollywood, it's going to have a happy ending. If it doesn't, it'll win a ton of awards. I guess the most important point from this coping mechanism, is that your life, no matter how sad it may seem, has value. You will tell a story with your life, a great story, a love story, a cautionary tale, a puzzle, that you dare not remove from humanity's collective consciousness. You don't know how many people need you, depend on you.You won't know until you're older, and you definitely won't know if you die before your time. Life isn't fair, and it isn't always fun. But it'll always have a chance to get better. I can't say that that last sentence will always be true, but statistically, it should be.

5. Statistics
Your plane won't crash and you won't get eaten by a shark. You will live to be 80 something (if you're a woman). You will get married. You will probably get divorced. But you probably will get married again. You will have children (or not). You will have friends (if you want). You will have a source of income. You will have more happy days than sad ones, though, statistically, you will remember your sad ones better. Statistics are oddly comforting. If your mind won't be tricked by emotional ploys, let it get tricked by logic. And with logic, you should be able to see just how important you are, and how much potential your life has for you. Everything won't get better tomorrow, statistically, that's impossible. But everything will eventually right itself. You can be loved if you want to be. People need you and care about you, if you'll let them. You may forget these people exist. But they do. You are important to them. You have to see how important you are. To yourself. To me.

If not, consult medicine.

I really hate white people

especially when they pull you over. for speeding. just once i'd like a black cop. okay fine. so i had a black cop pull me over once. and yea, sure, i didn't get off the ticket. but still. i'd like to be policed by people more similar to me. like barack obama. i feel like we're close enough. i trust barack obama. i trust him a lot more than i trust most other politicians. but not for the reasons you're thinking. goddamn white people. always jumping to conclusions. but at least they make some good music. Mischievous bastards.

Chase

Witness protection.

I was thinking today about how much cognitive dissonance I feel when I learn that someone has died. Your mind can't truly process death. I've looked at the condition in many ways, but it never makes any sense. It makes less sense than racism, my death. I do not understand dying.

In the beginning of last summer, a kid died. He wasn't a kid. He was about to go to college. But he had a condition where his heart was just a little misformed. Under the right conditions, his heart would stop beating. He died. When an old friend called me up, she was crying. My voice dropped an octave and I stated that I could not believe it. But I could. It made sense.

Later in the last summer, a student from Colgate died. I tried my very best to ignore the Facebook invite to his funeral. I did not want to know that he had lost his battle with cancer as I was beginning my studies at medical school. It was stressful. But it was also incredibly sad, because he had so many friends. He had been a kind but loud, hilarious but friendly type of person. I remember him so well that I could not believe he had died. But he had. And I believed it.

Today, my cousin died. He was not sick. I remember him. Not in small packets of flashbacks. Much more than that. I found out through facebook--his sister's wall post. And as I read the first line, I felt my senses distort. "Rest in Paradise." My mind immediately jumped to: He's moving? As I read through the paragraph, every verb written in the past tense only scratched harder at my consciousness. At the conclusion my mind blanked so I could only react with saying "no. no. no."

I refuse to believe it. Not because it is logically impossible but because I simply can't.

He was a funny, intelligent human being. So he can't be dead. He's only a teenager. That isn't fair. It will never be fair. My mind can't process it, so it's fallen into cognitive dissonance. It is playing around with reality. I refuse to believe that when I attend my sister's wedding this summer, with all my relatives, that he will not be standing among us. I refuse to believe that when Daft Punk starts touring for their Alive 2017 album that he will not be with his sister, my sister, and I in some city listening to their greatest hits. I refuse to believe this future because it feels like my own death. It is wrong. It is impossible.

So as my mind fills with memories of one of my favorite cousins, it only makes sense that he had witnessed some great crime and he was shuttled away to some South American country where he is making music on a cheap computer and watching the sun rise over the Andes.

I cannot afford to lose such a large percentage of my identity. My extended family is now misaligned. Will I ever be able to... feel normal... with my remaining cousins? We are an even number again. It would be easier for me just to assume that he is happier somewhere, and although I will never see him again, he is still alive. I understand now why some people believe in heaven. I am still opposed. But if ever a kid deserved eternal life, well, he's a good candidate.

So CIA/God, take good care of him. He may not have been the best human being in the entire world, but he was my favorite cousin. He was a good person, but more importantly, he deserves the best.