Abuse of Male Privilege

Okay, I've had a hard time articulating exactly why this bothers me, and I want some of my feminist friends to weigh in and help me figure out if I'm on the side of correctness or if I'm making things up.

Last summer, a guy hit on me at work, asking for my number. I told him no and lied and said I was engaged. He said he was married and implied that that wasn't a major factor. I told him I still wasn't going to give him my number.

He then told me he was just kidding around and that that's a Thing he does; asking women in various places for their number to see how they'd respond. I think he was a trucker, so he has a variety of women to choose from I guess.

I haven't thought about this in a long time, but now that I'm looking at it with strengthened feminist sensibilities, it seems like an abuse of privilege to the max. This is a guy who makes a habit of conducting this odd social experiment on women who are at work (a couple of his other stories involved waitresses).

How to say someone has depression?

This is something I've been trying to parse out for the last week or two: the semantics of how you speak about people who deal with depression (or whatever other illness).

I can pretty comfortably say that I have depression. As in, I'm pretty confident that it's a hereditary illness that I'll be dealing with for the rest of my life. (That's not to say that it won't be totally manageable at some point, but I'm pretty sure it'll be present. We'll see.) So, I have it, probably permanently.

But not everybody has depression. Some people have life events which cause them to experience depressive symptoms for a short time, and some of those people can take meds for a while and wean off and get better.

When I talk about depression, I want to include all the people who experience it. But I also don't want to contribute to harmful attitudes by using phrases like 'suffers from'. I think that phrasing is way too pointed and exclusionary. Not everyone who experiences depression is suffering from it, at any point or constantly. I feel like it also implies weakness, to state generally that people with depression are suffering from it.

'Living with' depression is probably a good one. 'Dealing with' is okay. I guess it isn't the most difficult of things to phrase, but I slip and say 'suffering from' sometimes. It seems like there are one or two more that I dislike but can't call to mind.

Random blurby microblogs!

A Year at EZ-GO

First of all, the name of my store amuses me a little. My involvement in the online atheist community has introduced me to people around the globe--I have New Zealand friends, for example. Who say 'zed' when they see the letter Z. On first glance, one of those people might misread the store name as ee-zed-go. It's not. It's meant to be easygo. But still amusing.

So yeah, this is my first actual job with taxes and a schedule and stuff. I've stuck it through for a year; my one-year EZ-GOversary (as I'm calling it) is tomorrow, the seventh. It wasn't expected that I was going to make it to a year, since Degon and I had plans to travel. But plans fall through, then you sign 16-month leases. What can you do.

Looking back on the year makes me want to write about some of the experiences I've had in this job. Not necessarily specific events, but just general stuff happening.

On Being Suicidal and an Atheist

Content note: depression, suicide, self-harm

A note to my friends and family: 
Before I even begin, let me just put it out there that I have been borderline suicidal in the recent past. However, there is a wooorld of difference between having suicidal thoughts and attempting suicide, or even executing some form of self-harm. I have come close, but not actually hurt myself since six years ago. As such, I ask that you not overreact to the content of this post and contact me frantically about how concerned you are. I also respectfully command that you not contact doctors or police or my husband to have me watched or controlled from those behaviours. I am fine. And anyway, if I genuinely want to die, that's my business and my right. I understand the troubling nature of this writing, but please remain calm.

Having depression is a bitch. It's a difficult illness to cope with, it's difficult to live with, it plagues most of your thoughts and decisions if you aren't careful. It's only been fairly recently that I've been able to look at my depression with a skeptical eye, thanks to the writings of Miri Mogilevsky and Greta Christina. Greta especially is excellent at viewing her depressive thoughts skeptically and being able to override her emotions with logic. I aspire to be that good at depression-defeat.

With depression, there's always a chance of feeling tendencies toward self-harm or suicide. This is true of a lot of mental illnesses. There are a lot of differing reasons one would have a propensity for self-harm; for me it's sometimes about hurting as much outside as I do inside, or using the endorphins as a pain killer (here I mean 'pain' in both the physical and emotional sense), or taking control, or punishing myself. It takes different forms.

A Look From the Outside

My brain lies to me a lot. The depression is, more often than not, the loudest thing in my head: affecting and directing everything else that goes on. This makes it very difficult to see any situation clearly, and it especially reduces my ability to see myself without the lens of severe criticism.

A couple days ago, I put myself in another perspective to try to see myself less subjectively. Well, just as subjectively, but not in a self-absorbed way. Basically I've imagined being a third party viewing myself from the outside. The idea is to fill in and imagine the position of someone who is a close friend, perhaps borderline romantic. Part of this is trying to understand why people fall in love with me, since sometimes I legitimately see no reason apart from intense masochism.

This experiment has yielded some interesting results!

Here's Why I Was Gone for a Month

I just got out of a pretty hardcore depressive episode. It was sudden, and I'm still reeling from the emotional whiplash, but at least I'm not defaulting to 'fuck I'm an awful person I hate the world what's wrong with me'. I mean, I still don't really like myself for the way I've handled the last month, but I'm able to think of myself as a relatively good person again. I was talkative all night and a little bouncy. More 'me' than usual.

And I think it's time to talk a little bit about what's been happening.

I had a birthday

Yes, Wednesday was my birthday. I'm now 19, which is fun to think to myself. "Hi, I'm Luxander and I'm 19 years old now!" We didn't really do a whole lot, I worked Tuesday night and spent my evening (i.e. Wednesday morning) just hanging out with Chris. My best friend Kate came over after we woke up in the evening, she stayed the night and then we went downtown to walk around and look at stuffs.

Overall, not super eventful. Not super great, but not horribleawfulbad.

I bought myself a Logitech G510 gaming keyboard, with all kinds of customization and macro keys and USB ports and volume/play control. Oh, and a heads-up display that I'll be using for omgidkwut. Most of the time it just shows the time and date, when/if I get back into WoW it'll probably be used as a stat-display in PVP.