Another drama-queenish article that blames people who are not 100% willing to be co-dependent with depressives:

But my story isn’t just for them. It’s for the father who doesn’t understand why his daughter is so miserable. Why won’t she just snap out of it? Her kids are healthy, she’s got a roof over her head, she’s got friends. What reason does she have for being so sad? She’s being ridiculous.

No, not ridiculous. She is being horribly and cruelly abusive to her helpless children who are convinced they are to blame for Mommy’s incapacitated state. The father should call the social services immediately and sue for custody.

It’s for the son who gets together with his friends and tells stories about his crazy mother. She’s never happy and sleeps all day. She hasn’t showered in a week. He’s tired of her bullshit. Doesn’t she know how embarrassing she is? Pull it together already.

It’s a great thing that the son is healthy enough not to feel guilty for Mommy’s drama and doesn’t let her manipulate himself into feeling responsible for this. Unfortunately, most children of these manipulators are too damaged to call their bullshit.

It’s for the husband who comes home from work and finds his wife curled up on the couch unable to speak, unable to unwind her body from the fetal position. All she has to do is look after the kids all day. It’s not like she has to meet a deadline at the office. If she had to sit through his commute then maybe he could understand. What is it with her?

She’s just bored and needs to be put to work immediately. The husband would be well-served by telling her to start working at a job immediately or he would call the social services and sue for custody. Adults can play these co-dependent games all they want but doing this to children is simply disgusting.

I’ve written about my struggle so that maybe you will understand that your daughter, your mother, your wife… they aren’t being ridiculous.

No, not ridiculous. Just manipulative.

They are suffering. They are in pain.

That’s no reason to make others suffer. “Lookee here, I’ve got a boo-boo, now forget your own needs and tend to mine” is not a position worthy of respect in n adult.

They are struggling with a sense of doom so overwhelming that they cannot see anything beyond it. It is real and it is awful.

This lack of self-awareness is really shocking. You can’t see anything beyond the doom, yet you manage to notice everybody who dares not to worship at the altar of your all-important drama.

And they need help.

The delusion that anybody other than a qualified specialist can “help” is both dangerous and really ridiculous.

In case people are wondering why this bugs me so much, I’m willing to share that somebody tried manipulating me into being his depression co-dependent in precisely this manner. I was young and foolish, and I even bought this spiel for a while. This is why I can tell you today: don’t buy into this performance. It will continue only for as long as there are spectators. Don’t be one of them.

Also, there is something very curious in this article. Please note the gender of the depressives in all of these stories and the gender of the people who refuse to play their co-dependent game. In case you are wondering who constructs womanhood as always equal to victimhood, here is your answer.

To answer the post’s title question, the only way you can help a depressed person if you are not a qualified healthcare provider is by refusing to participate in this kind of self-manifestation. Co-dependence might feel sweet at first but it will destroy you. So just say no.

I now have a new-found compassion for people with big bellies. As mine grows, I’m discovering that simple tasks I used to do without noticing them have become onerous. Wearing socks and tying shoe-laces are endeavors that have been sacrificed. Getting out of the beach recliner is an adventure. Painting toe-nails produces results that are reminiscent of Pollock’s paintings. Dropping things (which is something I do about once an hour) has become a very problematic habit.

And I’m only in the 6th month.

If a person is shipwrecked and ends up on a deserted island, s/he needs to build 3 houses in order to feel human and acquire an identity.

House #1 will be the place for the shipwreck to live.
House #2 will be the church or the club (depending on whether the shipwrecked person is religious) that s/he will visit it every Sunday or Saturday.

And what purpose will House #3 serve?

I watched the movie last night, and it did not disappoint. Aside from the powerful special effects that are strange but not annoying, the makers of the movie also offer their own reading of the great novel. Their reading seems to be that the narrator, Nick Carraway, is gay and hopelessly in love with Gatsby.

In order to support this reading, they change the plot in a variety of major ways. Nick’s semi-affair with Jordan is erased completely, Nick spends the better half of a decade after Gatsby’s death mourning his passing because – and this is an insistent motif- Carraway will never meet anybody as special as Gatsby ever again, both Nick and Gatsby are portrayed in a way that deprives them of all sexuality (which in the mainstream US entertainment is the most common way of hinting at homosexuality), etc. This is not my reading of the novel (enter “Great Gatsby” into the blog’s search engine to see mine) but I found it interesting.

The only real problem I saw in the movie was that the actors are a little too long in the tooth for their parts. Dicaprio works very hard to portray a much younger man and he isn’t half-bad but you can’t erase a 40-year-old face, body, and body language no matter how hard you try. Or at least not with DiCaprio’s degree of acting giftedness. The actress playing Daisy is not only very weak, but also has this extremely wrinkly neck that made all scenes where she was trying to portray youthful naivete quite clumsy.

Toby Maguire, the actor who plays Nick Carraway, has been forever typecast. A group of 50-year-old women in the audience yelled “Spiderman!” the moment he appeared on the screen. The actor didn’t help the viewers forget his most famous part as he kept adopting Spiderman’s trademark poses and facial expressions. The homoeroticism of the Spiderman series played into the queer reading of The Great Gatsby offered in the movie perfectly.

Overall, the movie is highly entertaining, a lot more comedic than the original novel, and curiously filmed. I recommend it as a good summer movie-going experience.

A blogger writes:

But this post about a bit of the book got me thinking about career risk-taking and being male, and the things I’ve gotten away with in my career that a woman probably wouldn’t, or at least would likely be effectively trained out of doing both by culture and having more responsibilities.

Sorry, my friend, but no. My sister left a very well-paying position with a huge company and refused another very well-paying position with another huge company and started a business of her own completely out of nothing. She had zero savings, an infant, and a partner in  company that was about to go broke and lay everybody off. And the business has become a huge success since then.

This is  only a gender issue to the extent that many women don’t feel the need to take risks because there are male partners to take the risks for them. There is no greater career killer than having a parent, a spouse, a trust fund, or a rich uncle about to kick the bucket as a financial cushion. And there is no greater career maker than having nothing and nobody standing between you and indigence.

The Marco Island movie theater is like no other I’ve ever seen. It has booths with tables and soft arm-chairs, and there is a large menu where you can order real food, salads, steaks, wine, desserts, etc, so nobody has to resign themselves to stinky popcorn.

Films that can conceivably be considered intellectual (according to Hollywood standards, that is) never come to my area. Even Anna Karenina was never shown in my town. So we have decided to watch The Great Gatsby while in Florida because we will probably never get to see it otherwise. My belief in the high level of Florida’s civilization evaporated, however, when I saw this warning attached to the film’s schedule. Yes, I’m sure 12-year-olds will be irreparably damaged by seeing “smoking, partying, and brief language” of the great American classic.

I don’t have television at home but when I’m on vacation I watch it to see what I’m missing.

There is this program about prisoners jailed in a stationary barge in NYC.

“Mike is here on a drug charge,” the voiceover explains.
“Josh is incarcerated on a drug charge.”
“Jose, Pedro and Juan. . . drug charges. . .”

“Justin is here for a parole violation.”

Oh, finally, I think. A real criminal.

“He is now serving the remainder of his drug conviction.”

The camera moves to a women’s penitentiary.

“Jessica is serving a sentence for drug possession. So is DeShawna. Breana started serving her drug-related sentence. . .”

All of this probably serves some purpose but I’m not sure which.

Commercials make you feel bad by showing you photo-shopped, digitally enhanced images of impossibly beautiful, incredibly thin or ripped men and women with perfect hair, amazing skin, and phenomenal outfits. You realize that you don’t measure up compared to them and feel compelled to buy the product the ad campaign is pushing to become more like the people in the ad. Right?

No. That’s absolutely not how it works.

Ads that make people feel bad would never be watched. In order to attract viewers to the commercial and, consequently, to the product, an ad should make viewers feel good. And what is it that makes people feel better than anything else? Having their beliefs confirmed, of course.

I’ve seen this happen many times. A bunch of ultra-intelligent people is sitting at a conference, listening to a talk. In the midst of profound insights, the presenter suddenly mentions something extremely well-known.

“Spain lost its last colonies in 1898. . .”
“Lazarillo de Tormes belongs to the genre of the Picaresque novel. . .”
“In the last years of his life, Galdos was blind. . ”

Suddenly, the eyes of the bunch of ultra-intelligent people glaze over. An expression of a near-orgasmic bliss graces their faces and they begin rocking as if in a narcotic stupor. No brilliant analysis or powerful insight makes them as happy as hearing what they have known, heard and repeated for decades.

This is how political campaigns work, and the news channels, and the newspapers, and even comedy shows. And, of course, this is how ad campaigns work, too. They show you the comforting picture of what you think the world should be like and you buy the product to reward the company for letting you inhabit, albeit just for a second, the universe that seems so right and correct to you.

So instead of commercials forcing us to believe that the world should be populated by cyborg-like creatures of total perfection, we are the ones making the ads so obsessively dependent on showing nothing but these images.

Nobody believes me when I say it but I insist that Connecticut is a very stupid place. I’ve lived in different states in the US (CT, MD, IN, IL/MO), and I am convinced that something is deeply wrong with Connecticut. See this, for example:

James F. Jones Jr. announced Monday that he will retire next year — a year earlier than planned — as president of Trinity College in Connecticut, The Hartford Courant reported. Jones has been under sustained criticism from many alumni since last year, when he announced that all fraternities and sororities would be forced to become coeducational. College officials characterized the retirement decision as unrelated to the Greek uproar, but the Courant reported that many alumni critics are dubious, given the extent of anger over the Greek decision.

You’ll say people in any state can go into an uproar over something this trivial. Yes, maybe. But in CT nothing but this ever happens. The state’s economy is disintegrating. If nobody notices that it is only because a couple of ultra-rich enclaves skew the statistics and prevent anybody from noticing the nearly third-world poverty of the state.

The state looks like a war has been going on in it for at least a decade. I haven’t seen such incredible poverty as in CT anywhere in the US, and I have crossed the country many times by bus and by car. In the meanwhile, people create drama over some stupid fraternities in some little dinky-wink college.

The Midwest is definitely a lot better off than this scary place.