• 4Jul 07

  Getting Ahead

  Yes, jobs. There are a bunch out there.

  Last Friday I did a phone interview for a job in the government. I didn't want it. I already have a decent job, one that I know well and that offers me a fair amount of spare time. Yes, that's right, I'm lazy.

  I didn't really try at the interview. I stopped half-way through questions and said, 'yeah, you know?'. Well, they were apparently impressed...

  Of course, my father caught wind of them wanting to hire me. He heard the message first. He tried to convince me that it's a very good opportunity, and that it's important for me to get ahead.

  Get ahead? What does that mean, you ask?

  It means you have to whore yourself out. It means you have to give more time than the other guy, in hopes that the time you give will... well... get you further? Deep down I have a distinct feeling that life is not a race. I also know first hand that extra pressure isn't worth it. If you make above 60k a year your life expectancy goes up. If you make above 100k a year, your life expectancy drops.

  If you have Bipolar disorder, you will probably die 7 years sooner.

  Damn, it's starting to add up... I'll be dead by 65 easily.

  Given family history... it's more like 55...

  • Posted Jul 4, 2007 5:47 pm GMT
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• 28Jun 07

  Depression

  I'm going to talk about depression for awhile. I think it's something that most people think isn't real, or is no where near as bad as it seems. Well, they can stop reading because those who do know the truth about depression know that it isn't a laughing matter. If any non-believers are still interested, good, because you're about to hear how it may happen to you.

  About 50% of people will be depressed sometime during their lifetime. Left untreated, it increases the chances of suicide by a substantial amount.

  I suppose it began when my father quit his job to start his own company. He had been making very good money before then, and the sudden change to self-employment was quite the experience. Things were tight.

  And then things started to go badly. The fella' he started his company with tried to rip him off, prompting my father to sue him and leave the company. This, unfortunately, left him out of a job for a whole year.

  Things got tighter. We started pulling equity out of the house, and I decided to get a job, mainly because I wanted a new rig. As soon as I turned 16, I started looking. Four months later I landed a job in a butcher shop.

  
  I think that summer, the summer between grade 10 and 11 was supposed to introduce a kind of 'fun time' in my life. I played football and was in great shape. But near the end of the season I got a concussion. It was the second of the season, so I was rightfully benched. School started up about 2 weeks later.

  I couldn't concentrate. The concussion had left serious damage to my short term memory. It was like reading a sentence word for word and then not knowing how to put it all together. It was just a bunch of words. I was able to pick up what 1 or 2 or 3 words in row meant, but past that was just guessing. So I suffered in school for the first little while, and it also had an effect on my emotions.

  I also gained some weight after the football since I still ate like a football player. Although I didn't baloon to an enormous size, I definitively regained my pre-season weight. It wasn't overbearing though, but it was more than what I was used to.

  And then in the third week of November my parents announced their separation. From the moment I saw my father's face I knew something was wrong. He rarely looked that sad.

  He moved out within the next few days into a downtown apartment. It was small and cold. I slept over at his place on the weekends for the first little while to spend some time with him. I remember him not being around much. He was working a lot... go figure.

  I had to work full time for the first week of the christmas vacation. It would have paid me $CND542.XX when all was said and done. In retrospect, no amount of money would have been worth it.

  
  I stayed at my father's apartment that week since he was much closer to work than my mother's house. I got to work around 7:30 and stayed until 8:30 on average. And then I took the bus home to a small foam matress and $20 left for supper on the table. Despite not being there, he was considerate. I worked like that for 6 days.

  I spent the next week at my mother's. I locked myself into my room and played KOTOR2 the whole week. I didn't laugh once, I didn't cry once. I was emotionally dead. My sister would want to watch me play KOTOR2 but would become quickly bored by my dreariness. She seemed pretty happy. After all, she had spent the past week with her friends. For **** sakes.

  By the 27th of January I was in the full grips of a horrendous depression. My thoughts were clouded with suicide. It seemed to leap out from everywhere at me. I gained 20lbs. I remember the date as being specifically the 27th of January since there was a news report claiming that the 27th of January was found to be the statistically most depressing day of the year, and that it felt just about right for what I was experiencing. I had spent most of the day trying to keep a panic attack at bay because of a stressful exam.

  In early February I found out that my mother was not only already with another man, but that he may be the reason why my parents split up. She had been with him since some time in December, officially. Unofficially though, she first met him some time around October. I'm sorry for saying this, but, if you have a significant other and are cheating on them, just ****ing leave them already. It's no use hiding it. Stop being a coward and come out with it.

  The timeline of events point nicely towards infidelity, although I think the reality of the situation is blurred. I don't think my mother went very far with the man whom was chasing her, but at the same time she let herself be chased. So she's not entirely adulterous, she's just a slut. That simplifies things.

  I met the scab in March. She had been seeing him for a while and wanted to know if I wanted to meet him. Now, as most my thoughts were either highly confused or were suicide plans, I didn't really know what to say. So I just kind of went along with it. Well, he was a freak. It can be difficult to smile to the potential rat that devoured your parents' marriage. But then again, I had been smiling at my mother for a long time, so why not him?

  Suffice to say by March I was thoroughly convinced that the seperation was my mother's fault. I know, I know, no one's at fault, but in this case, someone was. Why? Because my father could come up with a better explanation than my mother. I think any investigator knows that if someone can't come up with a plausible story right off the bat, they're lieing. That was my mother.

  She claimed that "things just happened that way" and that he and her new man "just happened to meet each other right after the seperation." Yeah, right. Like clockwork it was.

  In March was a kind of turning point. As I mentionned before, it was in March that I had come to the conclusion that the seperation and the confusion thereof was my mother's fault. I remember one day coming home to my father's new house after going to the cinema with some friends and finding out that no one was home and the doors were locked. I didn't have a key. So I waited. I went into the backyard and stared up into the dark sky, at the stars, wondering about the possibilty of life out there. And then it started getting cold.

  At around 11:30PM I decided to walk to my mother's house and spend the night there. It's a good hour-long walk. I remember walking around the bend, and in the back of my mind, the thought that someone else may be there had been creeping up. But at that point I was cold, tired, hungry, and I just didn't care. I placed my trust in her. She said, numerous times, that I could come at any time to her house.

  In the driveway was his car, whom I had not met as of then. A stranger in my house. Great.

  Then I puked some. I walked around as if someone had stomped on my fingers. I couldn't make a sound.

  So I walked back.

  I got back to my father's house at about 3:15AM and luckily he was there. He answered the door and I tried not to cry as I explained how I walked to and from my mother's house. I honestly felt after that that I did not want to see her for the next little while.

  Depression can happen to anyone. It happened to me. It affects you forever. Even now, nearly three years later, I'm affected. I have Bipolar Disorder type 1. I deal with suicide on a monthly, sometimes weekly, basis.

  If I were to give a rating of how close I came to commiting suicide I would say somewhere between 7.5 to 8.0 on a scale of 10. Although that's misleading. If I had owned a handgun, it would be much closer to 9.9.

  WARNING: IF YOU ARE SUICIDAL DO NOT READ THE NEXT SECTION. IF YOU FEEL MORBIDLY CURIOUS, I DON'T CARE, JUST SCROLL DOWN UNTIL YOU SEE THE NEXT ALL-CAPS MESSAGE. I DON'T WANT YOU TO HURT YOURSELF. I LOVE YOU.

  I reviewed many of the different methods. You can get enough cyanide from a cup and a half of apple seeds to kill you. You can hang yourself, although you have to be careful not to make the rope too long as it will decapitate you, and not too short as it won't break your neck. Either way you have to consciously wait for 10 or 15 seconds before you black out. That's a **** way to die.

  If you're thinking about carbon monoxide poisonning yourself, then think again. You don't pass out first. You get really, REALLY sick and experience an extremely painful death. Human bodies are designed pretty damn well to avoid death.

  I came to the conclusion that suicide via handgun would be the best choice. No pain. Immediate loss of consciousness. High success rate, perhaps the highest of all methods of self-death.

  
  ALRIGHT, KEEP READING BUNNY RABBIT.

  I was failing math. By the end of the semester I had an average of 68%. Considering my average for grade 9, 10, the first semester of grade 11, and grade 12 was about 85, 83, 79, and 83 respectively, I think it say a lot. While I suffered a bit at the end of the first semester of grade 11, it was nowhere near the loss of semester 2.

  I had quit my part time job in April. It was stealing 15-20 hours a week that could have been spent not thinking about suicide. Playing video games, for example. I was there for a whole year. I initially had a job lined up for the summer, but it thankfully fell through. When I finished all my grade 11 exams, I remember feeling free.

  Now, this is probably one of the greatest feelings you'll ever have in your life. Coming out of a depression. It's beautiful. The world wakes up again. The world seems nice again.

  
  I was in my father's basement. I decided I wanted to excercise. I did push-ups, pull-ups, curls, presses, and all those great things that newbies when they have no excercise experience. But it was so beautiful. It was like letting me heal at my own pace. Since 16 I had no time. I was finally getting back. And progress was so small. If you've ever read Le Robinson du Metro by Felice Holman, you know what I mean.

  
  I'll branch off and give you a synopsis. Le Robinson du Metro is about a man named Slake who one day wanders into an underground metro station. He searches in the tunnels and recesses and eventually finds a little hole where he can stay. He finds things and brings them back. Little scraps of food, for example. He eats ketchup sandwiches. Eventually he's forced out of hiding place due to rats and repairs to the tunnel. He finds somewhere else to stay, though.

  
  The man eventually notices that people throw out perfectly good newspapers, so he picks them up, folds them back up nicely, then sells them for a fraction of the price of a new one to a select few people. The people don't mind, they pay him the few cents because they feel compassion for him. And every day he does the same thing. He cleans up an area of the metro cafeteria just to make it better for people. Along the way, he picks up discarded newspapers in order to sell them. He buys his vending machine food, and he's content with his simple life.

  Along the way a number of little things happen. Little bumps, just enough to keep things moving. Nothing is overwhelming. There isn't some great stressor that he must overcome. He is overcoming life and its unbeareable aspects.

  I think that sometimes those make for the best stories. The biggest problems we face have nothing to do with nuclear weapons and always have to do with everyday life. Eventually, Slake leaves the metro station, ready for life again.
  

  In any case, I felt like Slake. I felt as if my life was slowly regaining meaning, as if I was relearning everything. Just as Slake had no history, I had no history. I was a new person. Memories that I had long forgotten due to the depression were waking in me. Every time a memory would recall out of seemingly irrelevant stimulus I would stare in amazement at how I could have missed it. Good memories, bad memories, all coming back. The day-to-day drudgery that was depression was now further. I could see my past, I could see my future. Suicide was no longer just to stop the immediate horror.

  
  The summer vacation was 2 months and I didn't work for the first month. I think I lost the 20lbs+ I gained during the depression in an instant. I was back to normal. More or less...

  Anyway, here I am, about two years later. I now have bipolar disorder. I still have problems I have to deal with. Sometimes, unfortunately, life just comes back to the dark. Although this time I'm experienced. I can handle most of it. Every once and awhile thought, I break down into the self-harming mess I was before.

  • Posted Jun 28, 2007 8:23 pm GMT
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• 28Jun 07

  Overworking.

  If you work out too much, you overtrain. The stresses on your body eventually become too high and your body starts taking serious defensive measures. You can develop a mineral deficiency, or you can weaken your ligaments and tendents resulting in injury. Overall, you suffer.

  But people never think about working too much. They never realize that fatigue is a sign of working too much, or that gaining weight due to stress is a sign of working too much (when the stress comes mainly from work and not from a lack of funds), or that utter desperation and suicidal ideation may just be a sign of working too much. It never really hits them.

  I think there's a serious problem with the way people work today, especially in terms of acclimatization to work. My first job was part time, about 15 to 20 hours a week after I turned 16. It was a shock to me. Here's something that required no quality thinking (which I'll talk about in another instalment), gave me no useful skills and enriched me in a highly abstract way. Money is the most abstract form of enrichment in existence.

  The job was required me to lie sometimes, which greatly irritated me. My boss wanted me to exude confidence, yet as a 16 year old I had none.

  I was hired in April, about 4 months after my 16th birthday. In November of that same year, my parents divorced. Actually, I think I'll stop here and go into a new entry...

  • Posted Jun 28, 2007 6:38 pm GMT
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