The Bull in Full

One last look at Thanksgiving: The Feast and the Fast

Before Thanksgiving gets too far into the rear view mirror, I wanted to talk a little about the holiday itself, absent its role as the now failing bulwark against Christmas Creep. 

The holiday actually proved to be the breaking point in a previous relationship.  Now, that relationship was already winding down peacefully, and it ended, blessedly, with almost no acrimony, but an argument about the third Thursday in November really tipped the scales.  See, it had become a long distance relationship, with her living in Minnesota and me in North Carolina, and I was asking her to come down to visit for the holiday.  It seemed obvious enough -- Thanksgiving has always been a great holiday in my family, and she'd have plenty of time off from work.  No, she argued, it was a holiday all about consumerism and centered around eating turkey (she was and remains an adamant vegetarian), and she wanted nothing to do with noting its passing.  In the end, I convinced her that the turkey was an afterthought amongst the stuffing and vegetables and rolls and pie for us, and that our celebration was all about coming together.  So she changed her mind, dropped in for the holiday, we all had a marvelous time, and the two of us promptly, very amicably, broke up.

I bring this up not to bore everyone with a relationship story, but to highlight Thanksgiving's murky meaning in the America of 2007.  I'm not going to even get into the question of whether Thanksgiving represents the start of European conquest of American Indians, other than to note it here.  (It always seemed to me to be commemorating the English being a bunch of idiots, but aside from that...)  What I mean to focus on is first, whether the holiday has just become nothing more than sanctioned gluttony and sloth, and secondly, meaning of "Black Friday," and the various attempts to protest or resist it.

The geographic critique of RTP-style public investment and economic development

In the past couple of weeks, I got into a bit of an online spat with my neighbor Chris Sevick in the comments section of Kevin's blog, particularly following this post and this post.  I have to confess, this is not the first time Chris and I have crossed words in an online forum, and I should probably know better by now.  Anyway, Chris has the tendency to jump into online discussions, and try to challenge the dominant conversational paradigm by bringing what he terms "philosophical" objections.  My problem with this is that, while I think Chris is a rather clever guy in person, I frequently find these objections (which I would term more theoretical than philosophical) rather unchallenging and reductive. 

But rather than get even deeper into the weeds there, the whole affair reminded me of something i've been meaning to link to for about six months.  (I haven't before because I keep meaning to write a detailed response and it keeps not happening.  So I'm giving up and just writing a brief thing here.)  I found it linked from, of all places, Richard Florida's website.  Florida is the academic who coined the term "creative class," and who has subsequently dubbed RTP as one of the top places supporting a "creative economy."  On the other hand, I do not know much about Brian Holmes, other than that despite his rather anglican name he writes significantly in French, and that his articles clearly show some serious chops in radical and critical geography.  (Given that critical geography was not my focus at UNC, it's possible a good number of my colleagues would recognize him.)  I don't know if he's a professor or just one of those "pro bono philosophers," but I found his article called "Disconnecting the Dots of the Research Triangle" incredibly fascinating, enlightening, and rather disturbing, both from a practical, theoretical perspective, and from a more personal perspective.  A warning, though, for those about to click on it: it gets into some pretty hard core abstract theoretical geography.  Definitely not for the faint of heart.  (And for those reading further, I'm about to go off on some minor wonkery of my own...)

A bad hip

In correspondance with a friend over this medication stuff, while receiving some very welcome sympathy, I found myself taking the attitude of, "well, it's not THAT bad."  I came up with this explanation, which I liked enough to put here too.  My depression, or whatever it is, isn't debilitating.  It doesn't destroy me, nor has it really ever managed to knock me down for very long.  So why bother doping myself up over it?  Well, think of it like a bad hip.  More than an annoyance, but much less than a disability.  Like if your hip let you walk just fine, but you couldn't run very well, and it got worn out after a while.  It's nothing you can't live with, but in many ways it's frustrating and limiting. 

This is an experiment, I guess, to see if the treatment is better than the disease.  Again, I could live with this, but if it means being less pleasant to those close to me, and not being able to do the things I want to do, perhaps it is in fact worth the downsides of the medication.

Speaking of, this morning the world went all bizarro again.  My initial thought was like taking an Actifed and then drinking three cups of coffee, but the best description of it I heard was that it was like I was really nervous or about to have a panic attack, but I wasn't really worried about anything.  I think the weirdest bit is that there were no physiological manifestations of this.  From the way my mind felt, it seemed like my heart rate should be going 140 beats per minute.  But when I put my finger to my jugular, my heart was just happily going along at an easy pace.  No fidgeting, no pacing, except that my eyes seemed to want to dart around a lot.

Word from Dr. Eimers is that this should last somewhere between 4-7 days.  It's also not nearly as bad in the evenings so far, which is very helpful.  It better calm down.  I'm fine sticking this out if it goes away, but there's no way I'm staying on this stuff if it doesn't.

World... odd...

Okay, quick apology here.  I've never found it terribly interesting before to read about other people going on medication, so I feel a little silly putting it here.  That said, now that I'm in th thick of it, reading about others experiences online (like this account) has been very helpful.  So, if you're like me in a normal state of mind, and find these accounts rather uninteresting, just skip this post and others like it, please. 

The world is a very strange place today.

Taking the Red, um, I mean Pink Pill

This moment is one I've been studiously avoiding for several years now.  This moment, as in, well, probably about five minutes after I finish this post.  That's when I have to face up to the supposedly benevolent menace pictured at left.  I think it's fair to say this downright scares me.  Not in the shrieking horror way, of course, but at some rather deep level, I'm terribly worried about what this little pill is going to do to my brain.

The pill is apparently something called "Citalopram," but is probably better known as a generic equivalent of the antidepressant Celexa.  Close to 20 years after a child psychologist first diagnosed me with depression, I'm finally breaking down and giving the "selective seratonin re-uptake inhibitors" a shot.