Saturday, April 28, 2012

since I've already written the damn thing...





The "BigB" blog sometimes doesn't feel like posting what one has written. It has one of those stupid "recaptcha" things where you have to retype a series of displayed letters, but sometimes lately, it simply isn't there. So this is what I wrote tonight and could not post. I saved it, so I figured what the hell.

It was written as a comment on Big B's blog rather than as my own blog post, but it does explain what the past eight days have been like. And it probably should have been a blog post here anyway.


I feel like I'm just coming out of a terrible week - actually a few days more than a week.
Three people connected with the small school at which I work died this past week: a long-time teacher, a student my age, and the father-in-law of a board member. Our school is very small - 50 students, maybe 50 faculty rotating into 32 slots per year, 75 alumni, a dozen board members. Whatever happens to one of us, we all bleed. And as the administrator, I am literally connected to each and every person.

I suffer from terrible tree pollen allergies and we're having a particularly bad tree pollen season this year. Maybe that's good for the trees, but not for my eyes. They hurt and itched and watered as if they were infected - and this was *with* medication!

Problem with the internet at work - on the phone for two hours with various representatives of "customer mis-service" at AT&T.

Oh - and I was unable to post here for three days because there was no recaptcha. The first time I had written a post that I was eager to share, for once forgot to keep a copy - there was no recaptcha so I simply pressed Submit Comment, and the comment vanished.

And I had a bit of a financial set-back, which can be very painful when money is tight.

I was so tired I fell into bed as soon as I got home each night, and had very little appetite.

So I was very depressed for about eight days. It was pointed out to me a few months ago that I hadn't had a depressed spell since I started watching Indian movies (last October) - this was the first one (used to happen every 2-3 months).

I know that I could use some sort of discipline or practice to help me keep my moods a little more calm and even. I was lucky enough to spend some time with the film director David Lynch, who has practiced transcendental meditation for many years and promotes it very strongly. I met a lot of TM people who work with him, and they were all extremely nice. I was very interested, and talked to quite a few of them about the training and practice. What particularly attracted me was that it seemed the technique they taught was quite simple and worked immediately. As I have tried to practice meditation on my own for years, always unsuccessfully, I found this very appealing. Unfortunately, the cost for the four or five sessions of training was prohibitive, and it simply looked less good to me that it was unaffordable to a middle-class person (this was before the economy fell apart and I dropped out of the middle class). Should something that seemed so healing and freeing be only available to rich people?

(Really, this is me feeling cheerful again.)


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