Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Things To Occupy You Over Break #2: Online Journalism
Thursday, December 25, 2008
CI Holiday Surprise!
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Things To Occupy You Over Break #1: Videos
Sunday, December 21, 2008
So, about me making promises I don't keep...
Thursday, October 2, 2008
HAI GUYS
Monday, September 1, 2008
"Hold On, We're Morons"
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Unchaperoned
(I wrote this in a hotel room in Albuquerque in the middle of the night.)
What began as an excuse, a sympathetic ruse we constructed to convince our parents to let us, both eighteen, drive unaccompanied from Durango, Colorado to Los Angeles, California, soon became the trip’s true reason, the only force that held the gas pedal down and kept us moving forward. I was there for “emotional support,” a role that overshadowed my previous position the night before, during our first night alone together. The memory of the shameless, ecstatic night, flashing back as we walked down the hospital’s glowing corridors, stung with guilt that held us to a more sober, grave, adult manner than we had been able to manage then.
At the time we had been dating thirteen months, somewhat casually and sporadically, with far more affection than devotion. That fall his best friend was in an accident in California, a motorcycle collision, and they told us back home he would be fine after a few months in rehab. Nathan sent a few emails, in the optimistic tone of denial all guys adopt during hard times. They discussed sports, the nurses at the hospital, and next year’s professors, all with a too-cheery overtone of confidence that Ben would pull through just fine.
That summer things took a bizarre turn for the worse, courtesy of an undetected injury to the brain that had waited, latent, until the weather cooled. On August twelfth, Ben’s mom called Nathan with the news. On August fourteenth, we announced to our parents that we were taking a road trip up to see Ben. What went unsaid was that it would be for the last time. I barely understood why I was going. Though both of us vaguely recognized the space in Nathan’s life that was about to empty, that I would be called on to fill, it was the allure of an unchaperoned trip that drew me. It was from this hazy knowledge that we formulated our story, a reason poignant enough to override parental concerns. I knew Ben as well as a girlfriend can know her boyfriend’s best friend – from parties, occasional double dates, stories Nathan would tell about growing up. He was there when Nathan learned to swim at five, when he saw his first dirty movie at eleven, when they got caught smuggling alcohol from Ben’s uncle’s trailer at sixteen. I went not because I felt an obligation to visit Ben but because I felt an obligation to Nathan and to my own young sexuality. Our imminent departures for separate universities whispered another unspoken knowledge - we may never get another chance.
On August sixteenth we were walking back down the hospital’s hallway, having left Ben (Ben having left Ben already), feeling painfully our immature callousness in the exploitation of the situation. The night before, when this shame started to unfurl its barbed arms, Nathan whispered, “Ben would have wanted it.” I went along, imagining the two of them high-fiving the next morning. And so the shame retreated back into the shells of our minds, waiting for its next opening, as we took advantage of its absence and of our hotel room, of its distance from every worried parent and brain-dead friend, of its thick comforter and thicker darkness.
But the guilt returned, and we, having no excuses left, were forced to bear its weight along with the awareness that for both of us, the memories of our first night together and Ben and Nathan’s last day together would be forever entangled. The anonymous, thickly covered hotel bed melted into Ben’s clipboard-adorned, thin hospital bed. Ambient lighting from the streetlight outside our window became the blinding glare of fluorescent lights off white tiling. Our sighs and laughs and gasps gave way to Ben’s fragile breaths moving rhythmically through tubes. Where we stopped moving and rocking together, Nathan was in the arms of Ben’s mother, shaking, leaning. Then, I was “Love,” but the woman who would always be “Mrs. Elaine” to Nathan held him now, with none of the girlish confusion I had behaved with then and felt again, a weak stranger with no place in the scene.
I had never seen Nathan cry before, never seen him lean on anyone with such need and desperation. I realized then that my given role on the trip was both my most important one and one I could never fulfill. He turned from Elaine, straightening up from her shoulder, and I reached for his hand with a pathetic futility. He took it, though – the ineffective seeming otherwise with no other option in sight.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Give 'Em The Old Razzle-Dazzle (or, what's not unfucked-up about drug marketing)
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Apparently I Think With Lots of Dashes
Monday, August 18, 2008
Lost in the Rye
Monday, August 11, 2008
Fashion
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Rescue pt. 3
Inside was a mess. Staffers were racing everywhere, shouting into white headsets. I didn’t even have time to slip mine on before my supervisor rushed up to me. “Dump your duffel and get your ass into the West offices. I’ll be right there.” It took me a moment to mentally locate the West offices – other times, without all the higher-ups buzzing around creating an air of formality, we called them Sears.
He came into the West office main room soon after I did, followed by two of his supervisors. Both were high-ranking military officers, but the complex was a civilian-run operation for legal reasons, so they were referred to as supervisors. This annoyed them. The four of us sat around the round table I had eaten a microwave dinner at the night before and countless nights preceding.
One of the two military supervisors spoke. “We just need to ask you some questions about your shift last night. Something has happened that must be investigated immediately.”
I assumed an appropriate expression of confusion and concern.
“One of our inhabitants has been abducted by a radical cell of DC sympathizers. We have reason to believe she was closely involved with the group claiming responsibility for the incident.” He had his military stripes pinned to the sleeve of his white Department uniform, ironically against regulations.
I fought the urge to laugh at the inanely bureaucratic secrecy. I was to know no details, even though I had worked closely on that case prior to the incident. Very closely, as evidenced by her black eyes complementing the lighter tinge in my knuckles. I took a deep breath and waited for an invitation to speak.
Monday, August 4, 2008
We Only Care About Money, Inc.
Monday, July 28, 2008
ADL is Actually Doing Little
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Helping Hands
Monday, July 21, 2008
Diagnosis: Human (Mad Pride Manifesto)
(SoCI: No, I'm not turning into Furious Seasons. I'll still have other stuff to talk about here. This is just a continuation to my previous post, and is here in celebration of Mad Pride month. Next week, new soapbox, I promise.)
Thus, we are “depressed” not because the world is being destroyed while we sell our hours to mindless routines, but because our brains are too weak to handle it. We are “ADHD” not because our culture slams us with an average of 3000 media messages a day, but because our brains are too weak to handle it. We are “schizophrenic” and “bipolar” not because we were traumatized or overwhelmed by the madness of our culture, but because our brains are too weak to handle it. Instead of taking a ruthless moral inventory of our culture, families, societies, economics, religions, education systems, and pointing the blameful finger outwards, we do it of and to ourselves, and now of and to our biology. Everyone is mentally ill, that is, every individual except the sum of the parts: society. ~From "Indicator Species?" by Steven Morgan
I can't get to the page to link you guys because I don't have a membership and don't want to fool around with all that, but apparently if you log into the DSM-V website, there's a place for "suggestions", and the DSM guys list five categories of suggestions. One of these is "suggestions for a new disorder to be added to the DSM."
When you consider that the DSM is pretty much the be-all-and-end-all Bible of psychiatric diagnoses, that's just weird. Inviting laypeople to make up new disorders? Nobody gets to make up other types of diseases; one has to discover a microbe or isolate a cluster of symptoms or something. This exposes the fluidity and subjectivity of what many people like to present as a solid, objective science. This invitation to create mental illnesses out of imagination, social stigmas, boredom, thin air or whatever speaks volumes about our society and the nature of mental illness.