Dear Monday

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Monday Musings: Depression

My uncle had this quote as his Facebook status the other day. I think it's a good reminder to those of us who suffer from depression and the like.

"Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.” — William Gibson

Happy Monday

Monday Musings; Tuesday Edition

Looking back on January I see that I didn't do as badly on my organizing goals as I thought I would. I completed 16 of the 21 days of organizing challenges at a bowl full of lemons, and I'm still working on number 17: the mail. The reason this one is taking so long is because it's evolved into an upheaval of my entire filing system.

The last four challenges were keepsakes, the master closet, photos, and then one of our choice. While the master closet might not take too long, the other specific challenges will take a while, certainly longer than one day. But I have to say, I'm impressed that I got so far. Toni's doing weekly challenges now, which I think are more my speed. This week's is to make a home management binder, which I've tried in the past and failed miserably. I think binders aren't my thang. I do still plan on checking in on her challenges weekly, to see what I am capable of doing.

This weekend was full of yard work. Well, not for me. I got to stay indoors and watch from the window. All the manly men went out and turned the soil with manly tools. [Insert a "Tim the Tool Man" Taylor gorilla grunt.]

Lots of backbreaking work.

But there's always time to spread the love.

As for me, I was sent in a downward spiral of depression that I still haven't found my way out of. I usually try to pull myself out of a pit like this by rationalizing with myself, like saying, "Hey, at least you have a job, a roof over your head, and enough food to eat. And it's not like you have to wrestle man-eating sharks or anything." The crazy thing is that depression is one of those dementias that makes you think, "I'd rather be wrestling a man-eating shark than dealing with this. At least then I'd be living in the moment." [I'm sure Ralph's thinking, "Wanna live in the moment? Get one of those pick axes and help me break up some of these dirt clods."]

I know. It sounds crazy. It is. The fog is starting to lift, though, and hopefully I'll be back in the swing of things soon. Until then I just have to fight the urge to pull the covers over my head and hibernate for a few weeks.

sorry. editors' humor

I hope everyone had a wonderfully-merry Christmas. Mine was delightfully relaxing. It was so relaxing that I didn't even get up to grab my camera on Christmas morning and take pictures of our little cherubs opening gifts. In fact, I have absolutely no pictures to commemorate this year's holiday. I also didn't make Christmas cookies for the neighbors until yesterday and I haven't called my grandma yet to wish her a Merry Christmas. I'll wait until New Year's and tell her I planned it that way.

This was the first time we stayed home with just immediate family. It was great not to have to travel, especially with all the new TSA shenanigans:

Sheesh. No one's exempt!
(Found on boingboing.)

The day was spent opening gifts, stuffing ourselves silly, and watching movies. My kind of day. I didn't even try and use my downtime for crafting, which I usually long to do. (Actually, at this time of year I'm usually so sick of trying to make homemade presents that I never want to pick up another crochet hook or glue gun again.) I did however do some web surfing and randomly found this this t-shirt design at Snorg Tees, which I thought was quite hysterical.





We didn't even really have to cook, as the pozole we made for dinner the night before also makes for an awesome breakfast. And lunch.

Ours kind of looked like the image above. It was our first time making it and it turned out super-extra delicious if I do say so myself.

This is a common Mexican dish to serve at Christmas. Going to the store the day before, I marveled at just how many carts had gigantic cans of hominy and chiles in them.


It was nice to recharge and try to restore some of the sanity I lost in the last few days before the big 25. Being a procrastinator extraordinaire, I had quite a few things to do within the last 48 hours and the stormy weather didn't help.

(image source)

I finally just had to resign myself to the fact that not everything was going to get done, and I relaxed a bit after that epiphany.


With New Year's approaching, I've resolved not to make any hasty resolutions, if any. Why start out the new year by setting yourself up for failure? I'll probably write a few things down, but for now, I'm going to try and keep this relaxing thing going a while longer.



Happy Monday

Monday Musings: A Dichotomy in the Desert

Winter here in the desert looks like the polar opposite of the rest of the country, at least the states in the Midwest and Northeast. It's quite dry most of the time and no snow below 7,000 feet. That's why this week's rain has taken people by surprise, as it's been raining for three days straight and will continue for at least another two.



My mom told me it's the biggest storm in Southern California in 10 years.


I love the rain, especially since it tends to keep most desert dwellers inside. That made Christmas shopping a tad bit easier this weekend, although not by much.

I also love the beauty of the rain, and the resulting green, which is in short supply around these here parts. I took a few minutes on Sunday during a brief respite to brave our flooded back yard and snap a few pictures. I love how the cacti, symbols of the dry desert, have water droplets clinging to them.





Blue was the only one willing to accompany me to the back 40. He's pretty much impervious to heat and cold and damp.




Just to give you an idea of how big these monsters are, Blue is a 75 pound dog, and he looks like a tea cup poodle next to them.



They are all at least six feet tall and six feet wide. Most of the time I stay as far away from the prickly beasts as I can, but somehow the rain made them beautiful.


Hope everyone had a good weekend.

Monday Musings

This weekend was pretty draggy. Mainly because at least half the family was feeling under the weather.

Also, for one reason or another, my Depression came slamming into me as soon as I woke up on Saturday. Wave after wave after uncontrollable wave. It's really hard to fend that off. I've known to expect this. While I struggle with my depression year round, times like the holidays tend to make it manifest itself more forcefully.

Usually I try to stay busy so I don't think about it, but every little thing exhausted me. So I slept off and on most of the weekend, and felt totally guilty about it. (Depression has a way of doing that.) No Christmas decorations were put up, no cookies baked, no presents wrapped, no quality time spent with family. It made me spiral even deeper down into the pit. That, coupled with the stress and anxiety of wanting to make this season special basically sets me up for failure every time (even if it's in my own mind). This is also the first Christmas that I haven't been on meds for depression, so I suppose it's only normal for me to be experiencing these kinds of feelings.

As weird as it seems, Mondays can be helpful in dealing with my Depression. The forced routine gives my brain something to think about other than guilt. Work, while not always the most exciting thing in the world, is a distraction, and makes me feel a little more normal.

It also helps when I stumble upon just the right thing at just the right time. I was on Emily's blog Chatting at the Sky today and came across a couple of posts about embracing who and where we are right now, dirty laundry and all, and how to deal with our unrealistic expectations of ourselves. It helped me feel better that someone else goes through what I go through. I don't feel so alone.

Those posts soothed me.

If you're feeling a bit crazed right now, go take a look at her blog. Her writing has a wonderful calming effect.








(image source found here, which also has an interesting take on HDS - Holiday Depression Syndrome)

Monday Musings: Confessions

(I have no idea who these people are; I'm just using them for their album title.)

There has been something grating on me lately. It seems to be coming at me from all sides and it can't be coincidence, except for the fact that everyone is talking about this kind of stuff given the holiday this month.

Truth: I am an extremely ungrateful person.

It's quite true. I am always seeing the negative side of things to counteract any of the positives. Always waiting for the other shoe to drop. The lightening to strike.

It seems like I've been hard-wired this way.

This fact really hit me last week when I was in class discussing the topic of gratitude. We had just had a lesson on how gratitude is so important for healing, being successful, pretty much anything you can think of.

When we broke into small groups, I confessed to the other women that I hadn't even done my Thankful Thursday post because I couldn't come up with 10 things to be thankful for that day.

Which, of course, is ridiculous. Which, in turn, makes me feel guilty. Which makes me crabby and mean, which leads right back to ungratefulness.

It's a vicious cycle.

And one I can't seem to find my way out of. Of course, there is alway the route of finding someone to slap me and tell me to deal with it, that my life is paradise compared to most peoples' in the world. I should sell tickets; there'd be a line out the door.

From what I've heard and read about gratitude (other than the typical stuff each November), I've noticed a common theme: it is something that has to be practiced. I've heard time and again that I can't wait for what I deem "good things" to happen before I start being grateful. I can't wait for the feeling, or even for the bad times to pass. I have to be grateful in any moment. Gratitude is a choice.

Whoo, tough medicine for me to swallow. I'm a fair-weather gratitude chick. But if I'm ever going to get out of my resentment rut (and I've been in it for oh, my entire life, give or take a couple of years) I'm going to have to do some serious hard work at this gratitude stuff. I can easily knock off the typical list, "I'm grateful for my family's health, our jobs, house," etc., but that's pretty much rote to me. Which it shouldn't be. I take that stuff for granted every. single. day. Which makes me feel like a horrible person. (I throw myself lots of pity parties, can you tell?)

So yeah, November tends to bring this inner turmoil to the surface. And makes me think that somehow I'm missing the gratitude gene since I can't even be grateful and thankful for the very basics in life.

So, do I "fake it until I make it"? I've been down the make-yourself-feel-guilty path and it hasn't really been working, since it just gives me another excuse to feel sorry for myself, and throw another party.

Sorry for the mental diarrhea. I'm hoping that if I can somehow get it out of my system, I can then move forward instead of wallowing in the same cesspool all the time.

To make up for it, I'll leave you with something a bit more uplifting so you don't feel it was a total waste of time to read today.

Here's a cool website called 1000 Awesome Things. I might not love all 1,000, but there are a few that make me laugh. I'll have to head over there soon.

And my old standby, Cake Wrecks. 'Cause nothin' shows a proper display of gratitude and thankfulness during this season than, uh, "cakes"....

Yes this is actually supposed to be a turkey.

Monday Musings

My weekend was nice, although I was feeling pretty run down with this cold that seems to be going around. Everyone else was very happy, as the Raiders have now won three games in a row for the first time since 2002, I believe. And I have to say, even though I hardly ever watch football (or have any clue what's going on when I do), the last 10 minutes of the game were quite exciting. Overtime and everything.

I don't know how I came across this video, (I think I was originally looking up Christmas songs and came across Last Christmas by Wham!) but it totally transported me back to my teen years. Before I knew it, I was listening to Just One More Try, Father Figure, and I Want Your Sex. I'm surprised I was allowed to listen to this stuff when I was thirteen.






I finally figured out (okay, so someone walked me through the steps) how to upload pictures from my cell phone onto my computer. Most aren't that exciting, like pictures of prices of crown molding taken in Home Depot.

There were a couple that I liked seeing on the "big screen" though.

Like the Bon Jovi concert I went to with my mother-in-law:

We were behind the stage and in the nosebleed section, but the concert was still amazing. Yes, Bon Jovi is just that awesome.

Some photos didn't bring back such happy memories, like the ones recording our temperatures in the summer:




Or of doctors' appointments:



But my favorites have to be from a series of a certain surly teenager being quite gentle and loving towards his youngest brother. Such a sweet moment. And oh so brief.




Hope everyone had a great weekend.

Monday Musings

Once again, our birthday pictures have a majority of shirtless people in them. I kind of wish Peez was shirtless in this one, only because that way you wouldn't see how dirty his shirt is...

Scary, we now have every child in the house in their teens. Heaven help me.

Fun to watch: Peez working in a restaurant as part of a football fundraiser. I love that they made him clean the restrooms. Is that mean of me?


So sweet: Watching snarly teenagers show such patience with their younger brothers. (I had even better pictures on my cell phone, but I'm not adept enough to figure out how to put those on the computer....)

I love that he picked a bench to sit on that would fit just the two of them.

Not so sweet: A woman paying for a $1.50 tamale at the snack bar with a hundred dollar bill. There was much scrambling to find enough change for her, which of course made the line grow quite large and stress out the poor snack bar lady even more. I guess I've never understood the allure of paying for something in hundreds...



Made me laugh:

Unfortunately, I've had this on my computer for a while and I completely forgot where I found it :-(

Have a great week.

Monday Musings

The weather is finally cooling down a bit here in the desert wasteland that is the IE, so watching Peez' football game on Saturday wasn't the torture it usually is.

What was torture was the shopping trip we had to make in order to get the boys some clothes that fit them better than the ones that look like they shrunk in the dryer. Of course, whipping each other with belts is much more entertaining than trying on dress clothes, so we saw some gladiator-stye fighting in the suit section of the store. Luckily it was a fairly quick trip so that made it more bearable.

Someone else who wasn't happy trying on clothes this weekend? Rhino, our "turtle." He did NOT like his Halloween costume, even though we're sure it will keep him warm (he's always shivering).


He took out his unhappiness on people and animals alike.

(Actually they always play like this. But it always looks and sounds like they're killing each other.)

These just made me laugh today.

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Happy Monday. (Yeah, I know; it's an oxymoron.)

Things That Made Me Laugh This Weekend

Hearing the announcer at the Pee Wee football game mentioning why some of the players are wearing pink gloves/wristbands, etc.:

"It's breast awareness month."

[Apparently the cancer part isn't worth mentioning.]

Standing in line at the grocery store and overhearing this one-sided conversation:

Little Girl: [with wide-eyed surprise] I just farted!

Little Brother: [blank stare]

Little Girl: No, really! Look! [runs around little brother and turns her back on him to show off her posterior]

Little Brother: [runs away]

Seeing this and thinking of someone actually wearing this down the isle.

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*Edited to add:

I really found this on Friday but I thought it was worth mentioning. This post at Hyperbole and a Half made me laugh so hard I had tears streaming down my face.

Happy Monday.