... Or A Few Months

Well, it's been a really long while since I last wrote anything. Sorry about that. Actually, I once had a five-year span where I only wrote about two or three times in my journal. This is significant, since I used to write in my journal almost every day since I was 18. Since then, it's been more hit-or-miss -- many times my motivation to write would dwindle to zero.

And that's how it was over the past few months. So, I have to say that from now on, I'm probably not going to write as regularly as I used to. I know that blogs that update frequently are probably better than those that don't, but I'm pretty much out of things to say. Everything I said since the beginning is still true. Not much in my life situation has changed. I'm still miserable, and life is still definitely not worth living. I've pretty much spent the past few months like a human vegetable.

A few small things are probably worth mentioning. A while back, I mentioned that I was supposed to undergo ECT. Well, my psychiatrist noticed a slight improvement in me after I started taking Adderall, which is a medication I had never tried before. So, the ECT is on hold for now. If you ask me, yes, there's a slight improvement, but I'm not exactly doing handstands.

I've finally managed to start doing a better job of managing my diabetes. I'm doing these annoying finger sticks every day like a good soldier, and I'm actually taking the pills I'm supposed to take every day more often. It's a very very small step, because I'm also supposed to be watching what I eat and exercising, but right now I get overwhelmed just thinking about that. I don't remember how much I've written about this before, so I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself, but I've been overweight for nearly all my life, and I guess it's only now that I'm older that my physical health is paying the price. But it's not like I just recently decided to stuff my face and sit on my ass all day -- I've almost always been like this, including since I was a child. I managed to lose over 40 lbs. twice in the past, but I did so only by going on these agonizing starvation diets and exercising every day and at every opportunity. I learned (the hard way) that this never works in the long-term because the moment you stop dieting and exercising, you go back to your normal habits, and the weight inevitably comes back. It's basically yo-yo dieting. For me, whenever I go on any diet, I can't help but feel like I'm depriving myself, either by my choice of food or by the quantity. What I need to do is permanently change my habits, and right now that just seems like too much. To do something permanently, to me, means more or less to do it for the rest of my life, and I can't see myself making any change in my diet or exercise for the rest of my life. To make matters worse, my doctors don't seem to pay any attention when I tell them this. Most of them say, "It doesn't matter, you still have to lose weight." Hmph. I guess that's true, but it doesn't make me feel any better. It'd be a lot easier if I thought my life was worth it.

Incidentally, I've also learned a little lesson about the things that people say to me (or to anyone, for that matter). I used to be very sensitive (and still am) to comments people make to me. Even though they may only be trying to be helpful, I used to feel hurt about the way they phrased what they said, or I would imagine that were certain implied criticisms in their statements. I believed this because if they were in my shoes and truly understood how I felt and where I was coming from, they wouldn't say the things they say. I still believe that's true, but I've come to understand two things: 1) Even if my interpretation of what others say to me is hurtful or critical, that may not be their intent. (This is probably something most people learn in kindergarten, but hey, better late than never.) 2) Being understood by someone else, at least to me, is really a luxury. So, instead of expecting to be understood by others all the time, I'm trying to be more accepting of times when I'm not understood. (A lot of conflicts between people are due to misunderstandings, anyway.)

And so life goes. Until next time.

Sorry to do this, but I'm going to be on vacation from this blog for a while. I should be back within the next few weeks.

Is There No Place On Earth For Me?
I've been spending some time reading the book Is There No Place On Earth For Me? by Susan Sheehan. It was recommended to me by someone who read the entry I wrote on Shame last month. It reminded this person of "Sylvia Frumkin," whose life the book describes. When it comes to books on this subject, I usually don't read books that others recommend to me. I like to think I've read every book out there on depression, and none of them has inspired me or motivated me to make changes to my life.

This book seems to be different, though. I try never to say anything about something I read unless I've read it in its entirety, but so far I can't help but mention some interesting things. (Once I finish the book, however, I reserve the right to abnegate anything and everything I say here. :-) ) So far, it's given me a sense of perspective about my own life situation. When I started this blog, I thought it was a relatively big deal. I thought it was quite unusual for an intelligent person to be depressed and suicidal for eleven years and to have been hospitalized on three separate occasions as a result. Sylvia Frumkin's story makes my problems sound like a walk in the park. I was worried when I first started about the possibility of my problems sounding trivial when compared to someone else's, but I decided to go ahead anyway. I don't retract or regret anything I wrote. Just because someone else had a rougher life than I did doesn't invalidate the pain I that experienced. Sylvia's difficulties were arguably much worse than mine were. She had to stay at mental hospitals much longer and much more often than I did. It made me realize that there are other people out there going through the same things that I'm going through, or worse. If this book ends up changing the way I look at life, then I don't understand why this book isn't required reading for everyone, starting from the 5th grade (or as early as possible). Hindsight isn't 20/20, but if I read this book when I was still growing up, it would have at least warned me of some of the realities of how life can turn out, and I could have adjusted my own plans accordingly. Even if I tried my best in life, I could still end up like Sylvia.

I will explain why I feel this way, but not right now. It would help if I finished reading the book first!

Computers, computers, computers...
I still feel very lonely and isolated these days. Actually, I've felt lonely and isolated since April 1993, so this isn't really news. I'm not even sure how I've survived this long. I guess I just want to repeat myself in case I forget. :-)

I've been able to occupy myself with at least one thing, though. I've almost finally finished building my new operating system. I hope I don't have to abort at the last minute, which is what usually ends up happening whenever I do anything with computers. I'm trying to use the Linux kernel with GNU software. Working on this eats up a lot of time. On the one hand, this is good because it helps decrease my idle time, which is the time when I am most despairing and suicidal. On the other hand, it's bad because it's a way for me to run away from my real problems instead of confronting them and dealing with them. Regarding my hardware, most of it seems to work on this operating system, except for my CD-writer. Initially, I was ambivalent about this, so I decided to go on with the installation anyway. However, I could decide on a whim later on that using an operating system that won't let me burn CD's using the hardware I currently have isn't worth it, and I'd just give up and use Windows. (Noooooo!!!) Even though this work has kept me occupied, the fact that I have no friends still gives me moments here and there where I want to kill myself. Trust me -- even though I may not end up killing myself, being in that state of mind is no fun at all.

I wish I could be a computer. Computers aren't suicidal. Computers don't feel anything. I would be cold, logical, and efficient. Actually, scratch that. I wouldn't be able to be happy, so I don't think I want to be a computer after all. It would be pretty cool, though, if a computer had enough self-awareness to kill itself, you know, if for example it ran Windows. :->

Work
Why is it that in our society we have all kinds of support groups, such as Twelve Step programs, support groups for alcoholics, substance abusers, women, victims of abuse, diabetics, the handicapped, overeaters, and more, but there are no support groups for those who are simply too weak and lazy? Am I the only human being in history weak and lazy enough to need a support group for being weak and lazy? Pardon me if I think that seems highly unlikely.

Why do I have to work? Work sucks. Why can't I be normal and have fun in life, like the birds and the bees and so on? (I know, birds and bees work, but that's because they don't know any better. :) ) Why can't I just relax and chill? If I get bored doing nothing, then it should be up to me whether I choose to work. I shouldn't be forced to work, even if it is necessary to earn a living. I only have one life to live. I'm not going to waste it doing menial, unrewarding forms of labor. I would work if it involved something I was interested in, like computers, or if the compensation was high, or if at least the work was mentally stimulating. I ain't sweepin' no floors. If menial labor is a requirement for existence, then I choose not to exist. Execute me. Genetically engineer my DNA from "respawning." Life is not rewarding enough to endure a lifetime of drudgery. As I've said before, I was brought into this world. I never chose to be born. If, when I was an infant, someone told me the things I was required to do in life, I would have thought about it for a moment, then I would have said, "Nah, cancel that shit," and I would have chosen to return to non-existence. Easy as pie.

Here's To Hope
Nothing new to report. My visit with my psychiatrist last Wednesday was uneventful. Nothing's happened since then. On the computer front, the OpenBSD install I tried failed because I'm using unsupported hardware. The lesson I learned here is that just because an OS says it runs on x86, it doesn't mean that it will run on my x86. Right now I can't afford to purchase any different hardware. Linux does support my hardware, though, so I'm going to give that a try and see how far I get.

I had to visit my endocrinologist last Thursday to check up on my diabetes. They checked my weight, and I found out that I balooned up to 288 lbs. Lots of famous people died right after they reached a weight they never attained before. I wonder if I'll be one of them. When I went in to see my doctor, I told him the truth -- as everyone should with their own doctors -- that I wasn't doing a goddamn thing about my diabetes. I wasn't doing those annoying finger sticks, I wasn't taking my medication, I wasn't following any kind of diet, and I certainly wasn't exercising. He seemed to have a sense of humor about it, though -- he asked me, "How long do you want to live?" It would have really been funny if I gave him the true answer to that, which is, "I don't want to live."

I always get antsy around any medical professionals who have no background or training in mental health, or at least in some sort of sensitivity training. Those without special training tend to have a hard time believing that depression is no joke, and that it's not something I can just "snap out" of. I really don't give a shit. Everytime I go to sleep, I hope I never wake up again. Let's hope tonight's the night.

The Prom
I feel like shit. I even feel nauseous. My eyes are glazed over. My cognitive faculties are barely enough to write down the thoughts I have in an organized fashion. I have to leave in a few minutes to see my psychiatrist. I don’t even want to leave my apartment, let alone see anybody. Everything I need, or at least everything I think I need, is right here. I can get myself into a nice groove just staying right where I am, sheltering myself from all the noxious influences of the outside world.

In one of my rare excursions into civilization, on Monday I had to go to a barbershop and get my hair cut. By the end of the trip, I wanted to disembowel myself. It wasn’t the barber’s fault. At least, not directly. The place I go to is pretty good for socially anxious individuals. I just go in, get a haircut, pay for it, and then leave. No fuss, no muss. No worrying about having to participate in some forced conversation with a person I could care less about. No toiling through awkward moments when I’m trying to figure out what the hell I'm supposed to say. I know -- this is the exact opposite of what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm supposed to be seizing this "opportunity" to "practice" my interpersonal and conversational skills so that I can "overcome" my shyness, and therefore, my depression. Why is it, then, that I feel like being boiled in oil is more rewarding than doing any of those things?

The haircut itself was great. The torture came from the television set that was right next to me. In case I haven't mentioned this before, I hate TV and I avoid watching it like the plague. Especially network television. As luck would have it, the TV in the barbershop was tuned into one of those brain-dead sitcoms that make one want to vomit more than laugh. Obviously, I didn't care to find out what the name of the show was. Unfortunately, what was most painful for me was not the sitcom's inanity but its subject matter. The situation was about some teenagers trying to ask each other out to their high school prom. I would have probably thought it was pretty funny if I wasn't busy trying to leap outside of my body. Everything about it was sheer torture. The kid finally getting the courage to ask the girl out was torture. The girl's excitement at being asked out was torture. If there's any single reason that makes me want to kill myself more than anything else does, it's that I never went to my own high school prom. Not only that, but I never did a thing about asking anyone to go, and I haven't changed one bit since then. This makes me feel like a permanent freak that has absolutely no justification for living. There's no recourse in society for a guy like me. I suppose being too shy to approach a member of the opposite sex is not all that uncommon. But who the fuck stays that way up until they're thirty? Except for people who've taken vows of celibacy, I don't know of anyone. One would think that even the shiest guy would have made some kind of progress towards overcoming his shyness by then, even if it was by accident. Heterosexual men aren't supposed to have their hands held when it comes to shit like this. In my experience, if I do, my sexuality is questioned and my peers ostracize me. Even what I'm doing now makes me want to commit suicide. You would think that instead of bitching about this, I would just shut up and do something about it. I don't know. I guess I just don't understand life.

Carrying the One
I've been feeling sick recently, so I haven't been able to write as much as I've liked. I haven't even had enough time to read my own blog to respond to any comments, e-mail, or anything else. The truth is that I've been too embarrassed to write. It's not because I'm afraid other people might be mean to me, but because I'm afraid of revealing my utter stupidity! I did one of those things where you spend a really long time trying to solve a particular problem (in my case, a week), but when you find out the solution to your problem, it only takes about half-a-second to execute, and you realize you shouldn't have spent nearly as much time trying to figure it out as you did. In other words, it's like taking a week to figure out that you made a mistake adding two numbers because you forgot to carry the one. I made the operating-system equivalent of that mistake. I guess my fear of being dumb is stronger than my fear of being weak. (It's funny -- if I spent the entire week doing nothing except stare into space, I would have no reservations about writing about that.)

Crying
Other things... I heard from somewhere that people who have really deep-seated anger problems can participate in special therapy groups where they get the opportunity to express their emotions safely. For example, they get these foam bats or pillows and they get to bang on things with them and scream if they want. What if a person has deep-seated sadness problems? I can understand a person being so angry that he or she wants to scream his lungs out, but what if he has uncontrollable urges to cry his eyes out? Sometimes, more than anything, all I want to do is roll up into a ball and cry violently.... not one of those cries where I'm just naturally sad about something, but a cry that's so painful that it's the end of the world. Sometimes I just want to cry uncontrollably and not care about how loud I'm crying and not want to bother explaining to anyone else why I'm crying. Sometimes I want to cry so hard that taking out the time and effort to specify and elucidate my thoughts would take me too much out of the experience of crying. I just want to cry for the sake of crying. That's irrational, isn't it? If I did something to fix the situation that made me want to cry in the first place, then that would seem to be more helpful than crying, wouldn't it? Then why would I rather cry than doing anything else?

Getting back to CVS... I thought I understood how to run it clearly enough, but whenever I tried to checkout the entire OpenBSD source tree, it would maddeningly break somewhere in the middle and refuse to continue. At the time, I didn't bother going through the CVS documentation to see if there was some way of getting around this. (Don't try this at home, folks. Never do anything without reading all the documentation. (I wish life had thorough documentation. If it did, I probably wouldn't be suicidal to begin with. In the "computer" world, people who don't RTFM tend to make problems much more difficult than they should be, or they create more problems instead of solving them. I don't understand why the "real" world should be any different.))

I eventually realized that I had completely forgotten about DOS's stupid reserved filenames. Because DOS is DOS, it imposes certain idiotic restrictions on names of files. For example, filenames like "com4.c" and ":tt" are not allowed. So, I actually took the time to manually go through the entire source tree and take note of filenames that DOS wouldn't swallow. Then I downloaded each file manually, saving each file under a filename that DOS could live with. Then I renamed each file back when I compiled the ISO. About four hours into this, my brain wizened up to what I was doing and realized what a complete waste of time this was. So, with a great big "fuck this" I decided to abandon dealing with the source tree altogether. Well, that was an interesting day. :)

OpenBSD
Life sucks as usual. Nothing much to report... Actually, I've kept myself busy the past few days trying to learn some technical computerese on my own. I figured it's better than lying in bed and staring at the ceiling for the entire day. I hate Microsoft Windows with a passion, so I've been trying to install a different operating system on my PC. I heard OpenBSD was very secure, and I've had some background with UNIX, so I decided to give that a shot.

The first thing I had to do was gather all the installation material. I've installed RH Linux before by simply downloading their CD-ROM images from their website, burning them onto CD-R's, and then booting them from the CD-ROM drive. OpenBSD offers a CD-ROM installation. I have to pay for it, but all the files themselves are available via anonymous FTP. Not wanting to pay for something that I believed I could do for myself free, I decided to take the cheap route.

Since I'd done UNIX installs before, I didn't bother going through any of the OpenBSD documentation. I did read something, though, that said the best way to retrieve the source was via AnonCVS. Now, I've heard of CVS from all over the place, but I'd never actually tried to use it myself. Given that my choices were to spend the rest of the afternoon either staring blankly at a wall or learning how to use CVS, I chose the latter.

Uh oh, I'll have to stop for now and pick up from here later. Sorry! I hate doing this -- it diminishes the reader's experience. Oh well, 'til next time...

I Need Love
I don't want to live if I don't feel loved. However, I don't need love in order to survive. But who's going to love me again? Where's that going to come from? To others, not being loved may not be a big deal. To me, it's like having my heart, my mind, and my entire being violently ripped apart.

It also makes me feel like not wanting to do anything. If I had a girlfriend who loved me, I could feel motivated to do lots of things. For example, I could be motivated to go to work. Right now, I feel too depressed to work. If I said this to my hypothetical girlfriend, she may say something like, "Please, do it for me." That would get my engine running. I would do it if it was for her, but not for me. Why should I work? The main reason why most people work is to earn a living. I.e., in exchange for working for their employer, they receive a salary. In turn, they use their salary to pay for things they need, such as food. Even if I worked at my dream job, it wouldn't be enough for me to feel like life is worth living. I know, theories state that work overcomes depression. Still, I need energy to do work. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I don't have the energy to make a single step. For what it's worth, all I have is the energy to ponder making a single step. Unfortunately, actions speak louder than words, or in this case, thoughts. (Sorry about all the clichés. :) ) Another side effect of having a girlfriend would be that I would be less lazy, and I would take better care of myself. I would take care of my diabetes. I would eat healthier and follow the diet I'm supposed to be following. I would exercise more often. I do none of these things now b/c I don't love myself at all. In fact, many times I hate myself.

Imagine two hypothetical people, person A and person B. They are exactly the same, except that during their childhood Person A grew up in a loving family but person B did not. Person A's parents loved him or her. They took an active interest in his life. They did things with him, but they weren't doting. In other words, they made sure that he had structure and discipline, and that he stayed within his boundaries. They spent time with him. They paid attention to his emotional needs. They recognized and honored his accomplishments. They were proud of him. They did these and other supportive, encouraging, warm, and caring things for him. Person B's parents did none of these things. They weren't cruel or abusive, but they weren't anything else either. All things being equal, if person A paid any attention to his parents, he must have much more self-confidence than person B.

I am person B. I contend that if I were person A, I would not be depressed or suicidal today. Unfortunately, such a thing cannot be proved. I know that having loving parents is not the only way to have high self-confidence. It sure as hell doesn't hurt, though. If my parents took an active interest in my life, I would have gotten the message that the things in which I was interested were worth in being interested. In other words, it would have helped me believe that the actions I took to pursue my interests had meaning. The absence of this was one of the ways that I came to believe that my actions had no meaning. I could have made friends that could have and can do this. But if my parents were like this, I would have gotten the message that my actions had meaning by default.

Right now I don't find my life worth living. Therefore, I need to get substantial answers to many questions. What am I going to do about this? Given that I am person B, is there anything I can do to become person A? How do I proceed? How do I make life worth living? By making friends? This is too hard for me for many reasons. One, rejection destroys me. I make too many negative interpretations of other people's behavior. Where do I find the energy to overcome that? What are my alternatives? I guess I'm supposed to ask the other person exactly what he or she means. Two, the potential for rejection plus the need for me to coordinate several difficult behaviors in the act of socializing make forming friendships just too much of a hassle. Maybe my bar is too high. Maybe making friends should never be a hassle. Regardless, this is why I just completely avoid socializing altogether. Three, all the work I have to put into this doesn't look like it will yield the intended result (i.e. the long term benefits of making friends isn't worth the effort involved). Four, the simple fact that making friends requires effort for me automatically puts me at a disadvantage to others who already have friends. Five, making friends is not supposed to be something that takes thirty years to accomplish. I'm jealous of other people who can make friends easily. I attribute this partly to my parents coming from another culture, but mostly just to my shyness. Some people are just born naturally sociable and outgoing. Is it fair that I have to expend tremendous amounts of energy to make friends, while others can do the same effortlessly?

Wanting What Should Happen To Happen
I had one goal. I wanted to be able to walk into a store near my home and buy one box of ten 3 1/2" floppy disks for myself. That's all. I did not achieve my goal because I wanted what should have happened to happen.

I went into a STAPLES store near where I lived. I figured that a box of floppy disks was a pretty common thing, so I expected I'd find it out in the open, probably somewhere near the front of the store. The first sign I noticed that this was going to be a bad experience was that as soon as I walked in, the place was packed. I found out later that an OfficeMax store across the street recently took a dive, so predictably all the customers that they had now stuffed themselves into here. That was aggravation number one. Aggravation number two was that the disks were not out in the open as I hoped. Now, you would think that if I had the slightest bit of difficulty finding something, I would have just asked for help from someone who works there and spared myself the headache. However, there were problems with that too, but I'll get to that later. I eventually found the floppy disks behind a locked cabinet along with several other pieces of expensive computer equipment. This was aggravation number three because why would anyone in their right mind want to store something that costs less than $5.00 in a locked cabinet?

At this point, I had no choice but to get someone to help. Aggravation number four was that I tried to get the attention of at least five different people, but they all completely ignored me as if I weren't even there. Talk about your invalidating environments. I know that the effective thing to do in this situation was to wake these people up and to be more assertive in getting them to help me. I didn't do this because I believed that this is not the way customer service is supposed to work. Store employees are paid to assist customers. It's their job to help me out. I believe that I shouldn't have to bend over backwards just to attract their attention. There are some stores I walk into where, as soon as I set foot in the place, the salesmen cater to me hand and foot, and if I tell them I don't need any help, they still watch over me as if I'm an armed criminal.

Anyway, I noticed that they had a customer help desk, and I thought I was in luck because it was empty. Wrong. It was empty for a reason. I stood directly in front of the help desk guy for at least five minutes, and he never looked at me even once. Then, a person who was ostensibly his boss or a co-worker came by and asked him to help another customer who needed help. Then he dropped whatever he was doing and helped this other customer out, leaving me completely alone at the help desk. Not only was I invalidated, but now I was abandoned. I finally managed to catch somebody who was alone who paid attention to me. I said to him that I needed to get something from behind the glass cabinets. He said to me, "Keys... I don't have any keys.... Ask that guy." As if I gave a fuck whether or not he had any keys. All I wanted was my box of disks! He ended up pointing to the same prick who had ignored me earlier, which was the last straw. He didn't acknowledge my existence before, so what reason would I have to believe that he would do so now? By this point, I was so flabbergasted by the entire experience that I just left in a huff.

As I said, I believed that they should have come to me, not the other way around. That's what got in the way of accomplishing something as trivial as buying a box of floppies. I was a cash-paying customer, and they just lost my business. It didn't matter that the amount of money I was spending was only $5.00. If I were shopping for a $2,000 computer and I had the same experience, they would have lost that money as well. If I were an IT director looking for a vendor to furnish computers for my company, they would have lost that money as well.

Breath Be Not Proud
That's it. I don't care how what I'm about to say makes me sound.

One of the reasons why I'm suicidal and depressed is because I don't have a girlfriend. Dammit, why don't I have one?! I thought the saying goes, "There's someone for everyone." If there's someone for everyone, why is there no one for me? This makes me feel like a pathetic freak!

I hate constantly referring to the past, but when I was growing up, I never had a girlfriend. The way I explained this to myself so that it wouldn't bother me was that I thought some people were just "late bloomers" in life. I.e., some people just didn't pick up the knack for talking to girls at as a young age as other people did. This was fine with me because I thought I would just indulge myself in other things at that age. I would do so until either one of two things happened: girls would become more interested in me, or I became more adept at talking to them. So, even though girls are great, there were lots of other things in the world for me to get involved in.

The fact that neither one of the two things I expected to happen happened makes me feel like I wish I were never born. I expected that one day I would have more confidence talking to girls. That never happened. How could it? I was too shy and avoidant even to approach a girl. Girls never become more interested in me, either. I thought girls in general liked men who were more mature. I hoped that the older I got, the more women would approach me. Therefore, I decided not to do a thing until I got older. What a lethal mistake! I ended up wasting roughly fifteen years of my life that I could have otherwise spent gaining experiences with women! I mean, how long am I supposed to wait until women find me suitably attractive? Until I reach sixty? (As a side note, this goes to show how fatal life can turn out simply based on what one tells oneself. Moreover, I didn't realize my folly until recently. It makes me wonder what other beliefs I hold on to may permanently ruin my life.) This is so so so incredibly painful and unbearable. I don't have the ability to go back in time to when I was younger and still wondering about all of this and tell myself, "Excuse me, young man, I've got something critically important to tell you. Don't wait until you're older to start talking to girls. I come from fifteen years into your future, and all this time I just waited until I got older. I never got a girlfriend!"

This is so important to me because it's one of the reasons why I don't place any value to my life. I feel so fucking alone in this goddamn world. Feeling loved seems to me like the only way I wouldn't feel alone. Nobody loves me. Why is this important? Actually, I don't have the answer to that. Do human beings need love to survive? Technically, I don't think so. All a human being needs to stay alive is air to breathe, food to eat, and water to drink. However, I don't know whether a human being that doesn't feel loved would want to live. I do know that I don't feel loved, and I definitely do not want to live. Life would be infinitely more bearable to me if I felt loved. Love makes the world go round. If I felt loved, I would feel like I mattered again. I would feel like my presence in this world makes a difference. Love would give me life. It would give me a reason to live. It would give me drive, purpose, and motivation. If someone had a crystal ball, told me that for the rest of my life I would be broke, unemployed, unsuccessful, and that I failed at everything I tried, as long as I was loved, it wouldn't matter. It would still be enough for me to keep on living.

Now this may be going overboard, but the more people that love me, the more reasons I have why my existence matters in this world. More people would desperately want to know what's going on with me as often as possible because, since they love me so much, they think about me all the time. If I felt hurt, for example, it would affect the lives of more people because, since they love me so much, they can't bear to see me suffering in any way. I guess all I'm saying is that I don't know how to live without someone else loving me. If nobody loves me, what's the point? Why should I live? Why should I even breathe?

Suicide: Read This Second
I came across this page on suicide the other day and I wanted to make a few comments on it. There are many wonderful things said on this page, but at the same time, there are many problems on this page that I must point out. First, I want to say that I have the utmost respect for what the authors of this page and what others like them are trying to do in general. If their message stops people from committing suicide, as I'm sure it does, then I think that's wonderful. Having said that, I must add that the statements made on this page are not guaranteed to help every suicidal person. If there's anything worse than reading something that's not helpful, it's reading something that you're told is supposed to be helpful but isn't.

The page delivers a very soothing message filled with care, understanding, and empathy for people who are thinking about suicide. It goes on to state that suicidal feelings result when pain exceeds pain-coping resources. Therefore, to eliminate those feelings you must reduce your pain or increase your coping resources. It sounds very nice and neat. However, it doesn't tell you what I, being a suicide veteran myself, have learned, which is that that's much easier said than done. I've tried to do both things for the past eleven years, and I'm still just as suicidal as ever. Before you even think of saying that eleven years isn't long enough, let me just add that it's been eleven years too many. It shouldn't have lasted more than one day after I started being suicidal.

Next, it gives five "things to think about," obviously intended to be of help to the suicidal person. I have thought about them, however, and my conclusions make me feel worse. First, it states that people do survive suicidal feelings. How? I must have read at least a hundred stories about depressed and/or suicidal people who have gone on to live happy lives. None of these people, however, had to deal with the same set of problems that I must suffer through today. The circumstances that led them to become suicidal differed enough from mine to the extent that if I tried to imitate what they did to survive, it would have no effect in my life. Second, it says to wait 24 hours before doing anything. Or a week. Motherfucker, I've waited for eleven years! When you look back at eleven years of pointless suffering, clearly the humane thing to have done was to put myself out of misery at day one. Third, it erroneously states that people turn to suicide because they seek relief from pain. Therefore, suicide doesn't solve this problem because, since they're dead, they won't have the ability to feel the relief that they seek, or anything else. That scintillating sample of sophistry would have set the Sophists themselves salivating. People turn to suicide because they seek an end to pain. They could care less whether they feel "relieved" or not. They pay a small price by sacrificing any feelings they may have had if they decided not to commit suicide in exchange for ending their pain now.

Fourth, it tells you to contact someone who will help, and it lists a few publicly available resources. That's a great idea as long as you are aware of people's limitations. People come, and people go. The person helping me can only be with me for a finite amount of time. He or she will not always be there for me 24/7. I believe I need that, because I can't stand living in my body for more than one second. Nobody can live my life except me. No one walks in my shoes except for me. Am I to spend the rest of my life feeling okay only when I'm with someone? Is life nothing more than an endless quest for companionship? I can't stay on a suicide hotline 24 hours a day. Suicide counselors are suicide counselors, not babysitters. They have their own lives, too. After a while, they'll probably just throw me into some hospital. For some suicidal individuals, this may be the best thing to do. For other suicidal individuals like me, whose goal is to build a life in the real world outside of the hospital, this isn't a good thing to do.

It goes on to describe other benefits of talking to someone. It says that doing so may be enough to regain my balance. For some, maybe, but for me, it hasn't in eleven years. It also says that the best coping resource they can give me is another human being. Unfortunately, the first few paragraphs at the beginning of their page have been more caring than any individual or group of human beings has been to me in eleven years. Those words have lasted longer than the amount of time any other fucking human being has bothered to care about me. The last time I contacted a Samaritan, or a suicide counselor, or another stranger, it was a waste of time. The other person didn't tell me anything helpful at all, not because he didn't care, but because he didn't know a single thing about me. As far as therapy is concerned, I've found that slightly more helpful because the other person at least knows me a little better. Therapy, however, only lasts 45 min. a week. That leaves 7 days, 23 hours, and 15 min. more for me to worry about.

Fifth, it states that suicidal feelings themselves are traumatic. Yeah, you'd better believe it! Finally, it mentions that depression can be treated. That doesn't mean it will be treated. I've received treatment for depression for eleven years. I don't feel any better.

Oh well, I wish words could be my friend. O first few paragraphs of http://www.metanoia.org/suicide, will you be my friend?

I've been busy trying to put together a FAQ about this blog over the past couple of days. Not because anybody told me to, but because I thought it would be helpful. In addition, I thought I would have fun doing it. I did. :)

That's why I haven't had the chance to write too much in the past few days. I met with my pdoc recently. I forget if I mentioned this here already, but he's a real piece of work, too. I guess he tries to care, but he ends up pissing me off more than most people do. I think he has a little overbearing streak. Sometimes I get the feeling he thinks he's so perfect that it must be my fault that I haven't gotten better yet. He acts as if it's impossible for him to make any mistakes.

At any rate, we spent some time talking about ECT. I don't think I'll get anywhere until I start getting those treatments. In the past, I always dismissed it as an act of barbarity that had no chance at all of working on me. How can it help me if it won't change any of the pathetic facts of my life? ECT won't magically give me a high-paying job or a girlfriend. I believe that these are the only two occurrences left that have any chance of making my life more bearable.

I've reconsidered this, though. ECT might be useful if it can change the way I react to events in life, i.e. if it can electrify the "giving up" response out of me. As I said in previous entries, right now I write from the point of view of a depressed person. Not only that, but I think, feel, act, and react like a depressed person would. If ECT can somehow change, or at least slow down that way of responding in me, I may have reason to hope. I wouldn't automatically decide that all actions were futile, that anything bad that can happen will happen, or that anything and everything I did was meaningless. Instead, I would at least give myself some additional time to think that through on a case-by-case basis before I jump to the "life is hopeless" conclusion.

As I described in a previous entry, I "learned to be helpless." I automatically decide that anything I do will not make a difference in my life. I do this without bothering to think through whether whatever I consider doing is actually futile or not. On the other hand, if I did give myself a chance to think it through, I could potentially decide that my actions do make a difference. This will at least give me a shot at changing my life, whereas I would have previously decided that I had no such chance. For example, imagine that somebody tells me that I should go out of my apartment today and do something. As of right now, I would tell that person to go fuck himself. I would decide automatically that getting out of my apartment just for the sake of getting out of my apartment is a waste of time for any reason. It seemed like it was always like that in the past. It was easier for me to believe that it would always be like that in the future rather than to try to think through for each given situation whether going out of my apartment would be helpful or not. ECT, however, makes that decision not so automatic. Therefore, after receiving ECT, I would take extra time to consider the person's suggestion. I wouldn't assume that going out of my apartment would be a waste of time. Instead, I would take the time to think about whether it would help me or not. It's as if I wouldn't immediately refer to my resumé of past catastrophes when making a decision. In fact, maybe the ECT will make me forget that resumé exists in the first place.

In any case, it will be interesting to me to compare my post-ECT entries in this journal to my pre-ECT entries.

Guile
I've got it! I am fishing for sympathy! I never admitted this to myself before because I didn't want to sound like a pathetic loser. I've done elaborate dances for my entire life to avoid that. I won't feel ashamed of myself, though. I believe that it was a natural adaptation to my environment. I must have made the observation when I was very young that people with sicknesses or injuries received extra attention. They seemed to evoke emotional responses like sympathy from others. At that time, I never believed I was lovable (I never felt loved by my parents or anyone else). My brain had to come up with a way to cope with this specific pain. By doing so, it was only trying to fulfill an innate human need. It was a natural response. For example, when you're hungry, you don't have to "think" that you're hungry. Your brain automatically notices that one of your needs is not being met, whether you are consciously aware of it or not. Therefore, it must create a response that will satisfy this need. Today, it may tell you to buy food at the supermarket. To our ancestors, it might have said, "Go into the wild and hunt some game." Whatever it is, it's only doing so because it has to fulfill a need.

My brain crafted a behavioral response in order to feel loved by someone. Anyone. In turn, this would serve as evidence that I'm lovable. Other people love me, therefore I must be a lovable and valuable person. To my detriment, however, I also believed the inverse of this statement: if no one loves me, I must not be a lovable or valuable person. I.e., I'm worthless. To avoid that outcome, I had to seek as much love and attention as possible from other people. It's like intentionally walking around with a cast and crutches when you're not injured to get others to notice you and extort some kind of emotional response from them. In other words, I surreptitiously engaged in a conniving, underhanded, duplicitous, malicious, and manipulative ploy. This is one of the reasons why I adopted the "woe is me" attitude. Consequently, I'm always pessimistic about myself. I never look at the bright side of things. I always focus on my dark side and my dark past, present, and future. This is why I always sound so depressing!

So what does this mean? As I said earlier, my brain developed this response so that I could feel loved by someone. If I didn't behave this way, how else could I believe that I was a lovable person? What evidence would I have? The answer is that my brain believed this response elicited the most affection from other people. In my experience, I didn't receive as much affection from others if I tried any other ways. For example, let's assume that it's dinnertime. You plan to eat out at a restaurant, but you haven't decided yet which one. Imagine that all the restaurants are located equidistant from your home, and all of them share the exact same price for their food. The restaurants range from take-out joints to four-star cuisine. Which restaurant will you choose? Since all restaurants cost the same and are the same distance away, your brain selects the four-star restaurant because the food you eat there will satisfy your hunger better than any of the others.

In my experience, no other ways of behaving brought forth as much affection from others as putting myself down did. Whenever I would be myself, nobody ever paid attention to me. Everyone labeled me as dull and boring because I liked to talk about math and science, while everybody else liked to talk about sports and sex. Since I functioned normally, and the others unceremoniously chucked me into the dull and boring category, they had no motivation whatsoever to pay attention to me. Feeling sorry for myself was the only way that I could make others pay attention to me. I exerted a measure of control over them. It's as if I had said, "I command you to have affection for me," and they obeyed.

Finally, I cannot underestimate the importance of articulating this into writing. People suffering from depression are usually too depressed to perform such high-level cognitive functions. They go to their therapists and say, "I'm depressed." He or she knows exactly why he is depressed, but he doesn't have the energy, motivation, or presence of mind to formulate this into words. This could result in impeding his therapist from understanding him clearly enough. I don't know of how much importance this is, however. I've heard of people who take antidepressants or undergo ECT and feel completely normal again for the rest of their lives. I'm hoping that the way I've described my experience of depression here has some value, and I hope that one day it will be helpful to others.
--

Having said the above, this will probably be the last entry on my history of depression. My entries here will still be cheerless and depressing. The difference is that I probably won't talk about my past that much. At this point, I believe I've written enough (or at least covered the most important points) in this blog to explain who I am, why I'm depressed, and what events caused my depression. If I commit suicide, I have no need to write a suicide note. Everything is right here. Of course, I don't believe this world deserves a suicide note from me, or from anyone for that matter. I have no obligation to give explanations or justifications for my actions.

As I said, everything is right here, unless BlogSpot goes down for some reason. Google no longer caches my pages, probably because of its blatantly abject contents. So, these pages aren't mirrored anywhere. I guess you wouldn't want little kids to type some random words in a search engine, end up on this blog, and read something about wiping my dick on some chick's hair. "Daddy, what does 'cum' mean?" Then again, I thought that was what Google's SafeSearch was supposed to do. Maybe they thought what I wrote was so reprehensible that they didn't want to have any hand in perpetuating its existence. Oh well, it's their search engine, so they can do whatever they want with it.

If I die, no one will probably know that this blog exists. Even while I'm alive, no one knows that this blog exists. :) When I started to get into this, I submitted this page to scores of search engines in a futile attempt to advertise it. I had no idea how ridiculously impossible it was to promote a blog. Today, this blog still gets no hits. I got more hits on a personal home page I created back in 1995 than this blog does now. This is the case even when I enlisted the help of promotional sites that specifically state they will send tremendous amounts of traffic. I guess that somehow they consider zero a tremendous amount. Of the few individuals who do visit, the average time they spend on this page is probably about five seconds. Posting a blog on the web is like writing a New York Times Best-Seller on crumpled pieces of scrap paper and throwing them into the wind. (Some NYT Best-Sellers deserve to be written on scattered pieces of scrap paper instead of being in print.) I think that even if I posted the cure for cancer, passwords to every adult site on the Internet, and nude photos of every female celebrity here, still no one would notice. Talk about suffering in silence. Sadly, if no one's reading this blog, then no one's reading this either, so the self-referential irony I'm describing is lost as well. I'm like a stand-up comic performing in an empty room.

The only way this blog could be made known is if Blogger, BlogSpot, or one of the search engines to which I submitted this blog makes the connection between it and me. Only these web sites know the real life person behind this blog. Therefore, I only have one chance: someone who works for one of these organizations must become aware of my suicide via a newspaper or some other means. If this person discovers my name in their databases, then from there they'll be able to connect the dots from my name to this blog. Of course, this doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of happening. First, the media almost never reports suicides unless the deceased is someone noteworthy. Otherwise, the only way to find out about a suicide is to go out of your way to a police station and find out if they filed any recent reports of suicide. Thus, Blogger and the other organizations have no way to become aware of my suicide by chance. Second, in the highly unlikely event that someone from one of these organizations does notice my suicide, the chances that this person will come across my name, or any name for that matter, in their databases are slim to none. No one can possibly know the names of every single person registered in their databases, especially organizations that have large numbers of registered users. (People with photographic memories might be an exception.) Otherwise, this person would have to go out of his or her way to perform a search for my name. What possible motivation could a person have to search their databases for a specific name just because that person committed suicide? I'm certain that employees of these organizations have much more important work to do. Third, this person must have the patience to sit down and actually read this entire blog. Fourth, he or she has to decide whether what he just read is important enough to let someone else know about it, like the police, my parents, or the media (not a chance). He could just as likely conclude that he's reading the author's fictional, albeit extensive account of the thoughts that some imaginary depressed person would have. Or, he may think that it's just nonsense spewed from some psychopath, akin to the Unabomber's Manifesto. It's not going to happen.

Eppur Si Muove!
As an aside, if you temporarily disregard his mail-bombing activities, Ted Kaczynski was a bright guy. He also had to endure a torturous childhood. He was also extremely shy and never socialized with other children. (Hmmm, this is getting scary.) If I met Ted in real life, we would actually have a lot of things in common. He's like a long lost brother. I guess the only difference is instead of mail-bombing others, I'll be mail-bombing myself.

I wish some fucking psychologist out there would get with the program and realize how fatal the consequences of being shy and socially isolated can be. Then, he should let as many people as possible know about it. Social isolation is the seed of many deviant behaviors. If someone took the time and effort to help Ted feel comfortable with the other kids, he or she would have saved the lives of the people Ted would have otherwise killed. Of course, there's no way of guaranteeing that. I'm asserting that, all things being equal, if Ted felt more comfortable and spent more time with the other kids, this must influence his behavior in some way. In my opinion, it would have been enough to cause him to decide not to send out his mail bombs. For example, suppose Ted weren't so isolated and he had some close friends whom he could trust. Even if Ted still considered sending out his mail bombs in this case, he would have brought it up with his friends if he were truly close to them. Unless his friends were exactly of the same mind as Ted, they would have definitely talked him out of it. If he had really good friends, they might ask him questions in order to find out his underlying motivation for sending out these mail bombs. For example, let's say he told them he wanted to kill people because he hated humanity. From there, his friends could recommend plenty of alternatives besides killing people that would allow him to express his hatred. Or even better, they may try to persuade him to think that human beings really aren't such a bad lot.

Isn't the stuff I'm saying obvious? Am I the only person who is aware of this, and everyone else is clueless? Who am I, Galileo? Am I the only person who knows that the earth revolves around the sun, while everyone else is too boneheaded to understand?

Based on this instance, helping out a shy kid can save lives.

I really should take a shower. Who would've ever thought that taking a shower required effort? If I don't have to go anywhere on a particular day, I usually never take a shower unless I can't stand my own stink. I think my personal record for the longest period of time without taking a shower is about a month. After two weeks, however, I knew I stunk to high heaven. Luckily, I still have enough sense to clean myself if I have to go somewhere outside of home.

I still feel depressed. Last night I actually managed to sleep overnight, the time most people go to sleep. Previously, I would be awake during the night and asleep during the day. I never particularly cared about sleep. Back in the days when I still had drive and ambition, I could go days without needing any shuteye. That's yet another reason to be depressed. In the past, my actions were meaningful enough to the point where sleeping became a low priority. Today, my actions have no meaning. It's like when you have an empty stomach, you feel really hungry, you can't concentrate as well, and your stomach makes all kinds of grumbling noises. The purpose of the stomach is to digest food. When the stomach does not contain any objects to digest, it does not operate the way it was designed to. Hence, the grumbling noises. I believe the mind works in the same way. If my mind is empty, and I have nothing with which to occupy it, it makes grumbling noises of a different kind. One of the mind's higher cognitive functions is to think about something. When the mind doesn't have anything to think about, it also doesn't operate the way it was designed to. It churns on itself, and I believe that's what gives me the feeling of my mind being torn apart.

I wish I could sleep all the time, permanently. I spent this morning trying to give myself something to do for the day. I tried to do this in order to avoid that intensely painful feeling of not being able to come up with anything to do. After an hour passed, I failed. I can't even look at porn and jerk off anymore because the goddamn antidepressants they force-feed me fucked up my ability to become horny. I can't even get a hard-on if I tried. Now that's depressing. Don't pdocs realize that having to take these pills just adds to my depression (or any guy's depression, for that matter)? Back in my teens, I could get hard just by looking at a woman who had any hint of being attractive, even if she were fully decked out from head to toe in winter clothing.

I decided to do what I usually do, which is to guess what to do moment-by-moment in an unfocused way. I would never have a specific goal or plan to achieve that goal. Given this case, it might seem to make sense to make up any goal just to keep myself occupied. I refuse to do that. It goes against my principles to attribute meaning to actions that I know are meaningless, or at best insignificant. This also harks back to my higher functioning days. As I said earlier, at that time my actions had meaning. If I wanted to work more efficiently, I needed to prioritize my activities. This causes problems today because the only goals I can set for myself are the same goals that were of low priority in the past. For example, today I could set a goal of cleaning my apartment. Maintaining a clean environment was never a priority in the past. Back then, my room was a mess, and it stayed a mess. I had all kinds of crap on the floor -- lecture notes, old exams, assorted garbage, and week-old ham sandwiches. As long as I knew where everything was, cleaning my room never held much importance. It was more important for me to calculate the Laplace transform of a Bessel function than to make sure my room was clean. Given this situation, how is it possible not to be depressed?

Zero
My mind is completely empty. I spent the last few hours sleeping my life away. I've spent most of my life sleeping the hours away.

This emptiness is unfathomable. I can't even think of anything to write in this blog. I feel overwhelmingly depressed, as usual. It just never ends, and I never feel like doing anything about it. This is hell.

If I had a weak constitution, as I had in the past, in moments like this I would probably head straight for the nearest hospital immediately. Now my constitution is slightly higher only because I realized staying in a hospital is worse than lying in bed at home. At home, it at least feels like home, and I have all my material possessions around. That makes me sick, because I try not to be a materialistic person at all. People like that have no depth or creativity, in my opinion. At the hospital, I would mope around without my stuff, and I would be surrounded by strangers. In other words, although I don't really give a shit about my life, I give enough of a shit to care about my environment, i.e. the home or the hospital.

Despite all this, life at home is not exactly a barrel of laughs. The social isolation is killing me. It makes me feel as if a powerful, invisible force inside my head is tearing my mind into shreds. This is all I can write.

On Assholes
Still the same... No progress. Yesterday my aunt invited my family over for dinner and asked me to take a look at her computer. That would be slightly interesting, I thought. When in front of a computer, I'm usually immersed in whatever I'm doing. That causes me to lose sense of time, which is important because it distracts me from the torment of my own reality.

We had some spaghetti, which tasted pretty good. When I was in the middle of eating my meal, a person I never saw in my entire life waltzed right in and joined us for dinner. That made me livid. My mother told me before we left that this dinner was strictly supposed to be a family affair, i.e. no outsiders. I was furious, but thanks to a lifetime of repressing my emotions, I looked composed and undisturbed. To me, only being around close relatives is entirely different from being around relatives and strangers. With close relatives, I can let my hair down, so to speak, and I have no need to worry about anything. I can walk around wearing nothing but briefs without offending others. (Yes, I wear briefs, not boxers. Boxers are too airy for me. I like my genitals snug.) I can walk around with my hair messed up if I want. I can pick my nose and fart as much as I want. In contrast, I absolutely hate having strangers around. I fucking have to put my guard up. I have to act polite and friendly, which sucks.

I found out later that this guy was a friend of my second cousin. He likes to drop in to my aunt's house at random times and hang out, uninvited. I detest people who do that. I'm the type of person who hates surprises. I always want to know exactly what the fuck is going to happen well in advance. What's more, the second this guy opened his mouth I knew I didn't like him. I can't explain how, but with certain people, I have a knack for knowing exactly what their personality is as soon as they speak. This guy was incredibly annoying. He spoke with this loud, nasal, intrusive voice. He was also one of those egotistic motherfuckers who think they're king of the world. I could tell by listening to the statements he made and the way he said them. Poor assholes like him have to inflate their own ego just to give their lives meaning.

I was in the middle of eating, and I wasn't full. Nevertheless, about 30 seconds after he barged in, I excused myself from the table feeling extremely pissed off. It became apparent to me that the only way I could bear the rest of the evening was to lock myself in the room with my aunt's computer. I did exactly that. I made sure I would never be in the same room with that asshole and would never hear his arrogant voice. Thankfully, I felt much better. The computer itself had a bunch of garbage appearing at startup, so I got rid of them. I noticed Kazaa and I was about to uninstall that adware-laden monstrosity, but my aunt told me that she still wanted the ability to connect to their network if necessary. So I couldn't get rid of the mountains of spyware and adware installed on her computer, since doing so would break Kazaa. That eliminated about 95% of the things I intended to do. The only thing left was to show her how to set her own desktop wallpaper. Much to my dismay, since I didn't literally lock myself in that room, that asshole (I never bothered to learn his name) intruded and examined what I was doing. He was bored and just decided to wander in. I would rather have had him wander somewhere else, preferably several miles away. He looked over my shoulder to inspect what I was doing. As you can probably guess, I hate people who do that, too. He repeatedly asked me what I was doing, and to top it all off he told me what I should do. Not only was he an asshole, but he was a know-it-all asshole. He gave me idiotic suggestions on what to do. Fucking asshole didn't know that my knowledge and experience with computers exceeded his by about a billion times. When he realized that I completely ignored him, he eventually left the room.

That ended up being an infuriating experience. Unfortunately, as of today I vow never to set foot in my aunt's house again, except in extremely rare circumstances. Even if I do go, I won't be caught unprepared as I was last night. I learned my lesson. Next time, I'll at least know that that asshole, including any other assholes like him, may barge in at any time. Bring 'em on. I'll be ready.

A Collection Of Essays: The Origin Of Failure
(Actually, it isn't, but based on its length, it could pass as a dead look-alike.)

The Best Laid Schemes O' Mice An' Men Gang Aft Agley
Just checking in... I feel the same, as usual. Empty and depressed. I don't have the energy or motivation to do anything about it. The following explains why. (I apologize for the length. I usually try to write as succinctly as possible, but in this case, I didn't want to leave out any details. I don't remember if I mentioned any of the following here in the past. Depressed people don't usually care to remember anything.)

Starting in high school, I created a very specific and detailed plan for my future. I was going to study such-and-such in college (sorry, I have to keep it classified). Immediately afterward, I planned to get an entry-level job doing such-and-such. I planned it so that every possible facet of my life was covered. I would earn a living by having a career as a such-and-such. The friends I made in college would be my social life. Making close friends in college would cover my emotional life. I thought that this plan would take care of every possible contingency. This process was similar to making a blueprint for building a house, or planning a military battle. First, you outline your plan of attack. Then you take care of your army's needs, the same way I took care of my needs. You make sure you have a supply route, you make sure you have medical personnel nearby to take care of any wounded, and you need a path of retreat in the event your attack fails.

My supposedly foolproof plan proved to be foolish. The first chink in the armor was the start of my depression, caused by a relationship issue I had at the end of my first year in college. Before that, I socialized as often as I could in order to make as many friends as possible. My efforts paid off -- people called me all the time, and I got tons of personal e-mail. However, when the depression began, I started to isolate myself. I was too mired in my own misery, and I had no interest in interacting with anybody. Therefore, this shattered the plans I made to cover my social and emotional life. Today, no one calls me. Every time I come home to my apartment and the light on my answering machine remains steady, especially when I've been gone for a long time, I feel the urge to kill myself. Friendlessness. I'm aware that I reap what I sow. Nevertheless, the fact that no one ever calls me further proves my worthlessness. I never receive any personal e-mail or snail mail, either. Even something as trivial as my mailbox consisting entirely of spam makes me want to commit suicide.

All was not lost, however, because I did craft a plan "B". In the event that my social and/or emotional life failed, I could devote myself to my career, and that would have been enough to keep me going. I loved what I was studying, and I looked forward to working after graduation. It wouldn't be a fulfilling life without social or emotional connections, but it was enough for me to find life still worth living. Then and now, I believe the most important thing in life and for humanity is the creation of knowledge. That one constant separates us today from our caveman ancestors. It leaves a permanent mark for humanity because it survives us after we die. Therefore, I believed my life only had meaning as long as I contributed to the pool of human knowledge. No other actions held any significance.

My enduring faith in scientific progress came about from my childhood. (Yeah, I know, yet another one of those corny flashbacks to childhood. Nonetheless, it's true -- for most people, the development of their present behavior originated in childhood.) There weren't very many ways to feel good about myself when I was growing up. My parents were mostly indifferent to me. They never did things like ask me how my day at school went, nor did we ever display physical or emotional affection to each other. My peers at school ostracized me because I was the class nerd. Only my teachers gave me any positive feedback. They praised me for my academic performance. Therefore, I felt that academics was the only thing worth pursuing. I actually hoped to be a professor or researcher in my field. I eagerly looked forward to the day that I would achieve this. Making friends or having a social life wasn't worth the effort because it wasn't as rewarding. I'm not trying to sound pompous or conceited, but I believed that the prodigious accomplishments I made guaranteed my dreams would come true. When I was a kid, the first time I took the SATs was in the 7th grade. I got a higher score than that of most high school seniors. By the time I was a high school senior, I was told that I was smarter than 99% of the population based on my test scores. For Christ's sake, I graduated from an Ivy League university. (I'm sparing my alma mater the embarrassment of being loosely associated with me by not mentioning their name.) Premier United States east coast universities don't hand out diplomas to just anyone. The average earned income of alumni from my school is over $200,000 per year. (Had my staggering income of $0.00 not knock down the average so much, that number would be higher.) You tell me: how can someone who's basically told that he's God when he's a kid possibly be happy with his life when he becomes not only mortal, but a bum by the time he's an adult? I'm sure it happens, but I've personally never heard of anything like that. Most importantly, I've never heard how they went on to live a happy life afterward, if they managed to do so. In the news, you never hear things like:

"John Q. Doe's business failed miserably today thanks to sheer stupidity on his behalf. Doe managed to achieve this spectacular debacle in spite of his carrying several advanced degrees and his Ivy League credentials. 'I just didn't have a clue what I was doing when I started this business,' he responded pathetically when queried by reporters. Doe was forced to move out of his stately multi-million dollar residence in Southampton, NY. He decided his next move would be to relocate to the bright lights of New York City. 'That's where all the action is anyway,' he cheerfully added. Doe currently resides in a medium-sized cardboard box on the sidewalk at the northwest corner of 42nd St. and 10th Ave."

Returning to the subject of my failed life plan, the final strand was cut a few years ago when I was laid off my job. The cut didn't actually happen the day I was let go. It happened when I couldn't find another job afterward. That was the last straw. Since the status of my social and emotional life went unchanged, the failure of my plan was complete.

This is important because I don't want to do anything now. I worked extremely hard and made many sacrifices to make my plan work. I endured a miserable life because I expected a payoff to come in the future. It never came. I felt that all the hard work and pain I went through was a useless waste of time. I placed myself in overdrive -- while in college I pulled all-nighters to study for exams, and I had a job at the same time. This is the reason why I have no energy or motivation to do anything today. What's the point? I'll just fail anyway, the way I stupendously failed with the first plan I created. Putting effort into doing anything would be futile and meaningless. When I put myself in overdrive, and I still failed, it was over. No matter how hard I worked, I would still fail. This is how my life became meaningless.

Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman, a professor of psychology, conducted an experiment in the mid 1960's that exactly illustrates my situation. The experiment, as described in his book Learned Optimism, entailed administering mild electric shocks to three dogs. In the first part of the experiment, the first dog was administered shocks that he could shut off by pushing a panel. The second dog was administered shocks, but he had no control over them. He would not be able to turn them off, no matter what he did. The third dog got no shocks at all. The second part of the experiment involved three large boxes, each with two compartments separated by a low wall. Each dog was placed into his own box. This time all the dogs were administered shocks that they could escape by jumping into the other compartment. The results of the experiment: the first and the third dog jumped over the wall. The second dog gave up, lay down, and let himself continue receiving the shocks. I am the second dog. I learned that no matter what I did, I could not stop the shocks. I could not stop failure from happening to me. Thus, my behavior can be explained perfectly. Since nothing I did made any difference in the outcome, I just gave up. I lay in bed all day. I let myself continue to suffer the pain of failure. I'm not trying to jump over the wall into the other compartment, where a potentially better life for me awaits my arrival.

People have told me countless times not to let what happened to me make me give up. That seems to make sense, but the energy isn't there. Imagine I ran a marathon, except that once I finally reached the finish line, the marathon coordinator tells me that I ran the wrong marathon. At this point, if I want to complete the correct marathon, I have to run all the way back to the starting point, then run the correct path to the correct finish line. What the fuck!? I spent all my energy just getting to this finish line. Now you're telling me to go all the way back and then do the entire thing all over again over a different path? How is that even possible? If I owned a vehicle and my fuel tank were empty, my vehicle wouldn't run. Period. It wouldn't move unless a tow truck came along and hauled it away. This is why I come across to everybody as a needy and lazy son of a bitch. People look at me and think I'm a normal person, so they wonder why I do nothing in life. They don't see my empty fuel tank, and my tow truck never came by. They don't know that before I ran out of fuel, I wasn't lazy. I was hard working, and I wasn't needy. Because I believed in my plan, I believed that I could be self-reliant and take care of myself, without needing anybody's help.

I just can't run another marathon. Some therapists have told me that "according to the theory," activity overcomes depression. If I start to do just one thing, gradually I'll gain momentum to be able to do more things, and eventually I'll become a functional, working person again. Wrong. Because of what I said earlier, I need a plan if I want to get anywhere. My original plan failed on the social and emotional goals. How will I achieve that in my new plan? My original plan satisfied my self-esteem because I would have a good career and I would be recognized for my work. How the fuck can I have self-esteem sweeping floors at McDonald's? I need solid answers to these and more questions if I want to have a plan that has a shot at working. I can't plan a military battle without knowing where my army's supplies or medics are coming from. If I don't have a path of retreat... I get killed.

I feel like the blood inside of me is drying up, slowly taking my life away. I don't know what kind of value I can attach to these empty times. All I can say is that I exist, I breathe, I feel, and I think, though not in a focused way. In this "empty" mode, my thoughts are never focused enough to articulate. These endless hours have populated my life ever since my depression started. If I listen to my mind, my life is not worth enduring this suffering, and it should end. Otherwise, I would have to accept the fact that the rest of my life will be completely barren and empty. That's not life. That's torture.

I can't even distract myself long enough to try to think of something besides depression. My identity has become depression. Whenever someone tries to get to know me, everything I say originates from the perspective of my depression. I have to explain any and every event of my life through depression. My interests are depression. My hobbies are depression. I do depression for a living. (Though, the pay is very low. It's very tough to get by with an annual earned income of zero dollars.) My favorite activity is depression. My favorite type of music is depression. My favorite TV show is depression. My favorite radio station is depression. My favorite sport is depression. My favorite game to play is depression. The favorite books I've read are depression. My favorite topic of conversation is depression. My favorite place to shop is depression. My favorite web site is depression. My favorite color is depression. My favorite fruit is depression.

The Psych-Helmet 2000
I must carry on with the depression, even though at times it feels unbearable. It reminds me of my profound emptiness again. I spent most of today lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, immersed in emptiness. To make matters worse, I have nothing to do until next Thursday. The only thing I can think of doing between now and then is practicing my imitation of a human vegetable. I think I've gotten pretty good at it. Too bad lying awake in bed isn't a sport, either. I've gotten good at that, too.

I wish there were a way that I could turn myself off instead of having to be awake during my idle times. If I had a social life, turning myself off would be a bad idea because over time I'd lose contact with any friends I had. Since I have no social contacts, that wouldn't be a problem for me. Turning myself off wouldn't make any difference. Many times, I've had this fantasy where I turn myself off until the year 2500. By then, I believe that they have an invention that gets rid of depression safely and permanently. They call it the Psych-Helmet 2000. I put it on, and first it scans my entire brain and detects any signs of mental illness. If it finds anything, then it painlessly injects nanomachines into my brain that have the ability to remove the mental illness. By that time, medical science will have complete and detailed information about the functions of every individual neuron in the brain. They will also have maps of neuronal arrangements associated with every mental illness. Based on these maps, the nanomachines will rearrange the individual neurons into the correct order, i.e. the order where the mental illness is no longer present. Then the nanomachines harmlessly leave my body, I take the helmet off, and I go back to being a normal, functional human being again. No muss, no fuss.

Bits and Bytes
I miss one of my favorite old television shows, "Bits and Bytes." I actually wouldn't know nearly as enough about computers as I do now if not for this program. It was a half-hour educational program on PBS about computers. It was produced in Canada, and it started in the early 80's. To this day, I haven't forgotten the names of the hosts -- Luba Goy and Billy Van. I loved the way it presented as many computing concepts as simply as possible. They even had a cartoon character to help explain. They even dedicated one show to BASIC programming. At the time, I knew a little BASIC (as much as an 11 year-old could know). Watching that one show made my interest and skill at programming skyrocket! Luba Goy was actually teaching a regular, everyday guy like Billy Van how to program! When's the last time you saw a program on television that taught you how to code, much less a guy who had neither knowledge nor technical aptitude with computers? They devoted another show to online services. Even at that time, I learned about the wealth of information available that I could access. That's when I first discovered CompuServe and got my first online account. I still remember my ID#: 72767,2117. I also used my 300-baud clunker of a modem to dial other BBS's that I also learned about thanks to the show. (Did you know that if you tried to download a typical 650MB CD-ROM image with a 300-baud modem, it would take 210 days, 8 hours, 41 minutes, and 57.33 seconds, or roughly 7 months to complete?) I always cancelled anything I was doing so that I would never miss a show. Hell, I even learned a few phrases in French!

What the fuck is up with these asinine TV shows like Survivor, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and American Idol? Personally, I'm waiting for a TV series that will explain the fundamentals of operating system design to the Joe Blows of the world. And I want to see it on FOX. :)

Ave et vale, Billy Van Evera. I salute you. Though you are gone, you will not be forgotten.

False Advertising
I wonder if I made a mistake when I described this blog as a journal of depression and suicide. It started out that way, but gradually it became peppered (if not flooded) with self-indulgent fantasies, inapposite memoirs, self-referential blather, personal opinions, immature preaching, irrational defensiveness, narrow-minded cynicism, and more. Maybe I should asterisk this blog's description with the aforementioned "features."

I still feel depressed. I know I'm repeating myself, but I'm probably going to say that about a million more times over the next few weeks. I think I've said that before.

I had a bag of cheese puffs for breakfast. So wonderfully nutritious. I felt slightly nauseous afterward.

I've almost always felt depressed. Sometimes I wonder how a person can possibly withstand his or her life with so much sadness, especially if the person has no supports. In my case, I really don't know. What comes to mind is that I'm forcing myself to live despite all this misery. It seems that the best end for any person forced to suffer through such a life is to be put out of his misery. Why was I born? I never asked to be born. I was brought into this world. Why must I suffer so?

"Is't Possible?"
I remember one time in high school where we had to act. I'm the type of person who couldn't act if my life depended on it, so I was understandably nervous. Our teacher split our class up into twos. Then he assigned random passages in literature to each pair for us to act out. I was paired up with a kid named T.P. whom I didn't particularly like very much. If we could choose our partners instead of having them assigned to us, I would definitely have not picked him. He was brash and rowdy, whereas I was quiet and reserved. We were like oil and water. He pretty much ignored me, even though we were in the same class for the entire year. When we were paired together, I was pretty surprised that he was very nice to me. I always assumed as far back as I can remember that any individual who ignored me didn't want to have anything to do with me. So I expected him to be disgusted and very annoyed that he had to work with me. I felt a little better that this wasn't the case.

The passage assigned to us was an excerpt from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Personally, I hate reading Shakespeare. But since so many people revere him, I decided that I just lacked the ability to appreciate his work. It's like those Magic Eye stereograms. Either you have the ability to see them, or you don't.

Anyway, the selected scene only involved two characters. I was to play one of them, and T.P. would play the other. When I first read my lines, I wondered how the hell I was going to perform this on stage. I couldn't read anything from Shakespeare, much less act it. The words resembled English, but I could never understand their meaning. Therefore, I wouldn't be able to adjust my acting according to the text. I.e., if I was supposed to look puzzled, I had no idea when to do that based on reading the text; if I was supposed to sound angry, I also had no idea; and so on.

So I found the whole assignment incredibly difficult. I had to force myself to memorize lines that I couldn't understand. I worked very hard -- in the days leading up to the performance, I practiced in front of a mirror many times. The only line I can clearly remember to this day was, "Is't possible?" Everything else was nearly impossible for me to memorize, but this line was the simplest of all. I also remembered it because it sounded like a pretty weird but funny thing to say.

T.P. and I never actually practiced together beforehand. That was a pretty important thing not to do, but I never asked him to practice with me because I was still terrified of him. Even though he was nice to me, I felt our personalities were so dissonant that it would have been very uncomfortable if we did practice together.

Predictably, our performance was a disaster. To begin with, being on stage made me feel nervous. For the initial part of our performance, we recited our lines well enough. So far so good. Later, however, everything got messed up somehow. I don't know if it was because he skipped a line, or I forgot a line, but our act became totally out of sync. Not only did I feel so embarrassed, but also I was scared that T.P. would get really pissed off at me. I was so confused that at one point, I just said the line, "Is't possible?" out of the fucking blue. I was positive I said that line at the wrong time. Luckily, T.P. was very understanding, and he wasn't pissed at me at all. The funniest thing was that we actually ended up okay. Despite the fact that the conversation we acted out sounded like absolute nonsense, we never broke down at any point during our hopeless attempt to act. I think in the end, this impressed our teacher the most. He knew that we recited our lines completely out of sequence, yet since we didn't break down and never gave up, he decided to give us a B. I was expecting an F.

Afterwards, I was relieved that it was all over. Unfortunately, T.P. and I never spoke to each other again. It's not because he didn't like me. During the time we worked together, he always treated me with respect and understanding. I think he knew that it would have been impossible for us to get along, so we just went our separate ways. The sad part was that I ended up wasting my time by being afraid of him. If I hadn't been afraid, we would have ended up exactly the same way, but I would have spared myself the unnecessary torture and terror.

The Un-Confidence Game
I have to tell the following story -- it opened my eyes about the true meaning of confidence.

During my stay in college, I usually spent weekends with the boys at a very popular bar on campus. One weekend, one of my buddies invited a friend, G.C., from his home town to join us. They came from the same high school. G.C. was only 16 and was still in high school, but he had a fake id. He was a short, skinny guy who looked like a dork and was an obvious 16 year-old, but the bouncers checked his id and let him in anyway. My buddies and I were all either 19 or 20 years old at the time, so we needed fake id's as well. However, we at least looked like we were over 21.

We came into the bar pretty late -- about half an hour before closing time. The bar was still packed, though, and there were still lots of sweet honeys around. My buddies and I really didn't do much -- we just ordered drinks and checked out the scene. The first thing G.C. did, however, was to get himself plastered. After all, a 16 year-old having unfettered access to alcohol doesn't happen every day. But being a 16 year-old, he was also intensely horny.

He looked around and saw a group of hot chicks sitting by themselves. There were no guys around. Showing absolutely no fear, he just sat right down at their table without even knowing them. We couldn't make out what he was saying, but he obviously looked like he was hitting on them. I wished I knew what he was saying. What surprised me, even to this day, was that after a while, one of the chicks actually let him make out with her. It lasted at least five minutes. This girl was incredibly hot. She had long, straight, brown hair and a perfect body. She looked to be around 19 years old. The moment I witnessed this escapade, I was extremely shocked and painfully jealous. If I got to make out with a hot 19 year-old chick when I was 16, I would have cum in my pants right then and there.

By this time the bar was closing. One of the bartenders actually had to break them apart physically. After we left the bar, G.C. didn't follow the girls. I think what happened was that these chicks went to the bar earlier, but they weren't interested in any of the guys that were there. They hung around just in case some cute guys did come along. I guess that by the time G.C. shamelessly inserted himself among them, they were too drunk and bored from sitting around the entire time without anything happening that one of the chicks just let G.C. get some action from her so that the night wouldn't have been a complete waste of time. When the bar was closing, she realized she just made out with a 16 year-old dork and got the fuck away from him as fast as possible. I was still persistently jealous because the damage was done -- even though the chick would have nothing to do with him afterwards, G.C. got more action that night than I've had in a lifetime. I learned the lesson that if you want to score, having confidence is more important than avoiding stupidity.

De-structive Criticism
I’m feeling very depressed again today, in spite of feeling better earlier this week. Someone called me a crybaby today. Oh well. My natural instinct is to feel hurt, as I thought all human beings would. But I'm supposed to tell myself things like, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me," or, "Words can't bring me down," from Christina Aguilera.

I actually received more negative responses than positive. I guess I should have expected as much from the Internet if I write this kind of stuff. Maybe this resulted from writing the other things that had nothing to do with depression. I only wanted to have the freedom to express myself, whether it had to do with depression or not. Actually, there is a connection: individuals who do not get to express themselves freely may react in many ways, including becoming depressed. It just amazes me how callous and insensitive people can be to a genuinely depressed person like me. Sure, I believe in free speech and freedom of expression as much as the next guy. People should be able to say whatever they want. To me, however, this just gives more evidence in favor of the assertion I made earlier that human beings are intrinsically evil. How is it at all possible, given this experience, to believe that humans are good at all?

Unconstructive criticism is an interesting phenomenon. It's the easiest and simplest thing for a person to say. It requires no thought; he or she is only revealing his natural reaction to whatever he is criticizing. Unfortunately, it also happens to be the least helpful form of feedback to the one being criticized. It takes much more thought and effort instead to sit a person down and say something supportive like, "Listen, I know you're proud of what you've written, but you should know that it might cause some people to think of you as a crybaby. If instead you did such-and-such, people will be less apt to think that. Or, if you told yourself so-and-so, you wouldn't feel as bad about yourself."

Alternatively, I could tell myself that I shouldn't care about what other people think. However, what if the other person's criticism is accurate? Wouldn't it help me in that instance to pay attention to the criticism? For example, let's say that someone tells me that I'm a worthless, good-for-nothing piece of shit. If this were in fact true, wouldn't it be to my advantage to listen to him? Shouldn't it motivate me to perform actions that would make me a more productive member of society (assuming that I know what those actions are, since the person criticizing me is not inclined to reveal them)? Suppose, however, that this person's criticism was false. Instead, the person criticizing me made a poor judgment, because I know for a fact that I already am a productive person. In that case, it would not be to my advantage to listen to him.

So the important question becomes, am I a productive member of society or not? Since the answer to this question is subjective, this causes a dilemma. Should I just ignore him if I really am a productive member of society? Or, should I listen to him because I'm a productive member of society, but I need to be more productive? What if I don't know how to be more productive, since the person criticizing me isn't telling me? What if he doesn't know how? What if all he knows is that I'm worthless, and he's implying that I should take it upon myself to do exhaustive research on precisely how to be more productive? What if I fail to find any such information? Wouldn't it be logical, then, to conclude that I really am a worthless, good-for-nothing piece of shit? Since it is impossible to know the answers to these questions beforehand, the best possible response is that I should care about what other people think. In the case that the person's criticisms are accurate, if I listen to him, I would be motivated to improve myself. If I don't listen to him, I would be missing an opportunity to learn something that would improve myself. In the case that the person's criticisms are false, I can simply ignore them.

Maybe what would help me most is to stop considering myself a member of Homo sapiens. Sure, I share the same body parts, but the similarity ends there. My brain operates on an entirely different frequency than everyone else. I think differently, I act differently, I make decisions differently, I see the world differently, I have different interests, I have different values, I have different ideas, I have different goals, I have different priorities, and so on. I don't belong on this goddamn planet. I'm like one of those radio stations at the end of the dial that no one listens to. It's the best radio station to me, but not to anyone else. Since no one else listens to it, it gets low ratings. When a radio station gets low ratings, it shuts down. It goes off the air and out of business because its operating costs exceed the revenue generated. My operating costs glaringly exceed the satisfaction and happiness generated. Therefore, the logical conclusion is that it's time for me to shut down, go off the air, and go out of business for the last time.

Oh well... If expressing my feelings means being a crybaby, so be it. I should look on the bright side. If people say it to me often enough, I'll just get used to it, and it'll no longer bother me. I hope so.