January 2007

FORD has posted the biggest annual loss in the car maker’s 103-year history and warned that things could only get worse as the company grapples with plummeting sales and soaring restructuring costs.

(more here)

If I could own my dream car – and with no concern for insurance costs or driveability in Canadian winters or gas mileage – it would be a customized Saleen Mustang. A Ford. I have a serious love for those muscle cars with their growling engines and their screaming fat tires. Yes. Please.

But I don’t live in that dream world, I don’t have that kind of money, it’s totally impractical and I do care about things like gas mileage and environmental impact. And I’m not the only one, either.

For the past few years, gas prices have risen – and, despite recent drops, will continue to rise in the future. This is a commodity that isn’t going to lessen in cost and, at long last, people are starting to realize it.

Hybrids and electric-driven cars are beginning to slowly but surely gain a foothold as the technology is proven, the cars are tested and the prices begin to fall into a reasonable area. Toyota and Honda are both leading the way in that department.

And then there’s Ford. Building bigger and less-efficient vehicles. Trucks. Vans. SUVs. Emphasizing power and strength and big fat tires and all the things that used to be incredibly popular when it came to choosing a vehicle. Stating that the majority of their profit comes from those behemoths.

Don’t get me wrong – those vehicles do have a legitimate place in our world. Farms need them, large families need them, people who work in certain fields require them. The average suburban person, however, doesn’t. And the average suburban person is beginning to realize that it’s not the most economical, environmentally-friendly way to get to the grocery store.

Last year, I sold my Ford Escape. It was a delicious small SUV, but it was derangedly expensive to own and insure and fill with gas. I worried that I’d miss being able to throw a small army into the back of my car – or two dogs, whatever – and I worried that I was sacrificing my own safety when we purchased two small Toyota Echoes in place of the big yellow beast.

In the end, my insurance dropped by 50%. Gas use dropped significantly, in addition to a change in driving patterns. And man, I felt pretty virtuous at the same time. We rent a van/truck when we need to move gigantic items, and the $50 cost (approx., each time) to do so is still a huge savings over the SUV’s annual costs. The dogs now wear seatbelts in the car instead of being crated (a definite adjustment for all involved but not a bad thing) and we alternate between Coffee’s car (a 4 door sedan) and mine (a 2 door) depending on our needs.

People, as a group, are beginning to care more about their own actions. Deciding if it makes sense to buy a big car or a small car in their own particular situation. Deciding what they need vs what they want vs what they can afford.

If Ford were paying attention to the market (the one they’re failing miserably in at the moment) they’d note that companies, too, are trying to cut costs. They may recognize Ford as a company that makes great heavy-duty vehicles – but perhaps they’d be even more interested if they could knock down their fuel costs when buying one. They don’t have to remove all the big trucks from the line, just remake them into something more effective.

And for consumers, wouldn’t it make sense for Ford to look at what people really want? They want style and they want comfort and they want to not overpay for a vehicle that’s going to cost them endlessly over the years of ownership. Hybrids, cars with better gas mileage, family-friendly cars that don’t belch exhaust all over the playground as they drive by.

The thing is, people aren’t stupid. We know the technologies exist and are being made refined with each passing day. We know that it’s possible to make cars less expensive and more efficient. We know that if a company like Ford were to make a major shift, other companies would follow suit.

So yeah. I’m doing a little happy dance watching Ford faulter – because I’m hoping it’ll smarten them up a bit a whole lot.

This is a pretty cool concept: building highways underneath the ground.

(Photo from that link.)

For almost a week, there has been a dark cloud hanging over my head. I’ve been reluctant to talk about it here, or anywhere really, as it’s one of those situations that’s not easily summed up. Too many facets that would require so much history and back-story and, well, it was too hard to get into in a blog or an email or any other way. That, and every time I started to talk about I’d start to cry.

It’s now clearing up – the sky is clearing, the clouds are moving away, and things are being resolved. The situation is no longer dire or desperate or unbelievably overwhelming. Now it’s something that’s not sitting on the end of my nose – it’s something sitting across the room that I can view objectively and work on fixing.

In other words, things are better. Much better.

An interesting article in the Atlantic:

Nowadays girls don’t consider oral sex in the least exotic—nor do they even consider it to be sex. It’s just “something to do.” A friend who attended a leadership conference for girls from some of the country’s top schools told me, “Friendships haven’t changed a bit since our day. But sex has changed a lot.” One of the teachers, from an eastern boarding school, told the students that when she was young, in the 1960s, oral sex was considered far more intimate than intercourse. The kids hooted at the notion. “It’s like licking a lollipop,” one pretty girl from a prestigious girls’ school said, flipping her hair in the ancient gesture of teenage certainty. “It’s no big deal.”

Very interesting. Well worth a read.

I’ve been struggling lately. A lot of “figuring out” to be done. A lot of uncertainty and a lack of confidence. I’ve been second-guessing, trying to read minds, trying to lean into the world with my shoulder.. It’s a lot of work and it’s completely non-linear and, goddammit, I’m not enjoying any of it.

And so.. I give up.

First, I confess that I do not know why people do the things they do. I do not understand them. I need to stop trying to figure people out altogether. The need to understand things is the same need that makes me turn into a hermit when I don’t manage to solve the problem. Withdraw.

I don’t know why, when I express my thoughts/feelings/needs I end up feeling worse than I did before. It makes me think that there’s more crud underneath to expose or that I’m being punished for speaking the truth. I’m reluctant to touch it, anyway, even though I want to pick at the scab and force it all to heal.

As a result, I can’t seem to choose between speaking (and saying things wrong or being criticized, misunderstood..) and not speaking (and thus not being represented, but saving myself some angst). I feel either completely exposed or hidden and nothing in between.

I just GIVE UP. I QUIT. Fuck it.

If you’ve sent me email to my old domain (the one that ends in “violet”) within the past few months, I did not get it. The reason is because the account was drowning under, quite literally, thousands and thousands of spam messages that the filter couldn’t catch.

I tried adding a whitelist but it only made a small dent in the flow that just wouldn’t stop. I cleared out as much as I could (nothing like being told you can’t delete messages because you’re overquota and your mail program keeps trying to copy the deleted message to the trash folder.. eeep!) and then just started nuking stuff.

Seriously – more than 10,000 emails! Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!

The account is now forwarding to a specially-made Gmail account (all the better to filter with, my dears!) and hopefully things will be a bit more manageable. I think most friends are emailing me at my regular Gmail anyway, so, y’know, carry on..

I’m slowly but surely catching up on all the various bits and pieces of information I’ve been holding onto for a while – from emails to confirmations – and with any luck, I’ll get myself back in line for decent email response times again. It’s appalling (for me!) to login and find that I’ve got email MONTHS old that I haven’t replied to – even when it’s from people who don’t expect a reply. Yeeesh.

Part of what’s driving this is my urge to add Linux to my laptop (the piece of shit Dell) and the need to clear out some of the crap that’s been lingering on that machine. The other part is just a general urge for a touch of order amongst the mess that regular life sometimes throws my way.

“You didn’t reply to my email. Did you want to get together for coffee this week?”

“I.. Look, I know this is going to sound really weird, but I’m just not comfortable with the idea of us being friends.”

“Why? Did I say something wrong? We’ve only known each other for, what, two weeks?”

“No, it’s just.. Oh god, this is going to sound so stupid.”

“Seriously, I.. well, just go ahead. I won’t take it personally.”

“Okay. I just can’t handle.. your name. It’s.. it’s like one of those Nigerian scammer names. And whenever it pops up in my inbox, I start to get mad at you for stealing money from little old ladies. Those Nigerians totally take advantage and, well, it’s not right.”

“…”

“See? I told you it was stupid. Oh god, I feel so bad about this! You can’t exactly control what your parents named you, but it’s just so… foreign..”

“My name IS Nigerian. My family is FROM Nigeria. But that doesn’t mean I..”

“I didn’t know you really WERE from Nigeria. Whoah. Okay. Well, now you see why we can’t be friends! It makes sense! I can’t be friends with someone whose entire country is made up of people who do, like, email scams.”

“…”

“So, anyway, I’ll see you in class next week, ok?”

Although last year was the first time I’d ever had a major anxiety attack – and oh, what a dilly of a month-long attack THAT was – I’ve come to realize that chronic anxiety has always been a part of my life. Always.

The physical sensation of anxiety is one that I can recall, as far back as five or six years old, even in situations where anxiety wasn’t expected. (In other words, while I felt it at the same time others might – like giving a speech – I also felt it while spending an afternoon reading a book.) I had no idea it was anxiety – I thought my body and mind just had its own vibration (albeit an unpleasant one) that was more revved up than other people.

As a young kid, my coping mechanism for that anxiety was to turn toward books. Given a free day, you’d find me curled up on a heating register in the living room, or in a patch of sunlight on my bed, twitching my legs incessantly and devouring a novel. When pulled away from reading, I’d be angry and irritable – something I now realize was in part due to the anxious feelings returning. It’s not much different now, either.

Around the age of nine, I discovered the soothing properties of food. Junk food, specifically, but nearly anything would do. Cramming as much food into my mouth as possible, as quickly as possible, really helped to numb the anxiety. As I began the habit of stealing baking ingredients (dark chocolate that I didn’t even like, for example) from the cupboard and as I was hiding candy wrappers in the sofa, I knew that I was going to be yelled at for taking the food (and bingeing) but I still couldn’t figure out what was driving me to do it. Over and over, that cycle repeated, and over and over I resented any attempt to take away my soothing junk food. I didn’t like being yelled at, of course, and I hated that I was eating food that I ‘shouldn’t’ and yet… I couldn’t stop doing it. I felt better, somehow.

From there I shuffled into the world of eating disorders as a way to quell the anxiety and, later, I moved into drinking ridiculously and having sex with inappropriate people after my Mom died.

Anti-depressants and therapy addressed plenty of issues at various points in my life, but never the anxiety. I’m not sure I knew that’s what the feeling was and, of course, I couldn’t explain the “high revving” feeling. It didn’t start to make sense until the major flip-out I mentioned earlier.

Now that I’ve realized the chronic, low-grade anxiety around my edges, a lot of things have become a lot clearer to me. This isn’t the kind of freaking out that necessitates medication (though I do have Clonazepam if I need it – I haven’t, since last year, taken any of it) as I’m functioning, eating, sleeping and breathing normally. I am thankful, still, for the reassurance of that little bottle of tiny pills.

But this is the kind of anxiety that invades my day-to-day life in subtle ways.

Having recognized it, the issue now is that I have very few coping mechanisms to rely on and even fewer that could be considered healthy on a regular basis.

Food – and junk food in particular – still helps. Unfortunately, like any other ‘drug’, the quantities of crap required to keep me perfectly un-anxious for any lengthy period of time makes it an unhealthy option. I cannot live off of chocolate alone. (Seriously. I’m shocked, too!) I know that I’ve been more anxious than usual when I find myself eating more chocolate than usual. More chocolate tends to make my ulcer flare up and an angry belly makes me even more anxious which builds into excessive acid in my stomach and.. you see the bad circle here, right?

Sleep is another good (in terms of working well) coping mechanism. A good long nap not only helps the anxious time pass by more rapidly, but, well, when you’re unconscious you’re not really feeling all that anxious. The problem, of course, is that one cannot spend most daylight and evening hours asleep without wreaking havoc on the body and mind and the actual living of one’s life. I know that I’m the sort of person who reacts strongly to an interruption in sleeping patterns and that I require more sleep generally than most other adults I know. But there’s a limit and I am prone to pushing that limit when I feel anxious.

Smoking pot helps with anxiety, but realistically, I can’t sit in the living room smoking doobies all day and night. I mean, I could but I suspect bad things would come from that. Not to mention the increase our grocery budget would see as I plowed through bags and bags of Doritos.

For a period of my life, I went through a shopping phase. If I felt anxious, I’d buy something – small, big, cheap, expensive, it didn’t matter. I was regularly walking past some amazing, funky and fantastic stores when I made my way to work each day and if I felt crappy, I’d pop in and pick up something quirky and fun to cheer myself up. I’m lucky that I didn’t get myself into significant financial distress as a result of it. Now, (un)fortunately, this coping mechanism isn’t effective for me; I often find shopping to be a bit of a chore.

Snuggling up to Coffee, in a manner that he refers to as “koala” is a quick and effective way to soothe myself – but, um, he has to go to work sometimes. His boss isn’t inclined to accept, “Hey, I can’t come in to work today because my wife is attached to me with her fingernails. But could you pay me anyway?” And it’s not exactly reasonable for me to call him up at the office and demand that he come home so I can snuggle up for ten minutes and make myself feel better.

Another option is to increase (or change) my antidepressants. I don’t want to do that. I’m working toward getting off of them altogether, rather than switching them all up. For what it’s worth, I do not intend to attempt going off of the meds until I have some good, solid coping mechanisms in place AND spring has arrived (at least). I have committed to seeing a therapist who specializes in anxiety, as well.

My goal for the coming weeks is to work on self-soothing and picking up healthier habits as they pertain to anxiety. I’ve already made a few recent changes and I have a few more ideas. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them – by comment or email or whatever. All good.

It’s 11am and my work here is done.

Well, not really. I mean, the dogs are fed and walked, the bedding has been changed (to flannel gnome sheets, no less!) and all the clean laundry has been put away. I’ve loaded the dishwasher and scrubbed the sink and put away all the ephemera that seem to collect in the kitchen. Things are.. tidy.

I approve of tidy.

One of the goals I set for myself when we moved into this house was that I wanted to keep it tidy. Not meticulous, not obsessive, but tidy. The kind of place where if someone dropped by unexpectedly, I could just kick aside a few bits of clutter and feel okay with how things looked. I have become much less aware of how other people may view my living space now that I am in a living space that I love.

It started with the bedroom. Every morning, after we’re up and at ‘em, I make the bed. Then I throw things into the hamper and fold jammas and fling open the drapes. I put the remote controls in one specific spot and I stack my library books neatly on the bedside table. I take my empty water glass downstairs. There. The bedroom is done.

Then I tackle the kitchen. I load the dishwasher and wipe down counters and clean up any crumbs surrounding the toaster. I organize the “to be paid” stack and the “new mail” stack and I open up the blinds to let the morning sun in. Kitchen: done.

Then the living room. The entertainment unit is closed up, the remote hidden again, papers and books stacked neatly, throw-blankets folded. Dog toys are tossed into a stack (because I know they’ll mess ‘em up shortly enough) so I can move around without stepping on them. Blinds opened. Living room: done.

The library, just off of the kitchen, doesn’t get much daily use. It’s where the water dispenser is, and it’s where all the books are, but we don’t make any clutter. I pop in there simply to open the blinds and grab a glass of water. Library: done.

These are the primary rooms we use, of course. Soon we’ll have more rooms fully unpacked and organized, I’m assuming, and then I can expand my daily routine to include those spaces. It’s rather nice to keep things manageable and reasonably tidy. It’s wonderfully freeing to be able to find things easily and know where things should be returned to after they’re used.

In short, I’m working on the “cleaning up as you go along” theory – and it’s working for me. Much less stress. Much less of an overwhelming feeling when it comes time to do a deep cleaning (like vacuum and dust and scrub things down). Some mornings I dread the idea of making the bed, but I do it anyway. I feel better, even when I know I’ll be flinging myself under the duvet with a library book (and thus messing it all up) later in the day.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): It’s Be Your Own Muse Week, Cancerian. How should you observe this festival? Here’s one suggestion. First, visualize in detail your dream lover . . . your ideal soul mate . . . the embodiment of everything you find attractive. Second, imagine that though this person feels the same way about you, there is a very good reason why the two of you can’t make love or be together as a couple for a long time. Next, feel the sweet torment of your unquenched longing for each other, the impossible ache of fiery tenderness. Finally, picture all the ways you will work on yourself in the coming years to refine your soul and perfect your love, so that when the two of you can finally be united, you will have made yourself into a gorgeous genius–a pure blessing and exquisite gift for your beloved.

(Freewill Astrology)