Happy Easter!

It's been a beautiful Sunday of doing very little.  The day has been clear and blue and warm, and I was careful to get all my bill-paying and apartment-cleaning and grocery-shopping done yesterday – didn't get to the laundry, but that can wait.  So this morning I got up, put together an Easter pie for breakfast, popped it in the overn to bake, meditated for half an hour or so, made some coffee, ... and then ate pie and drank coffee in a lazy way while reading and watching the sun and breeze play with the trees outside my window. 

After a couple of hours I changed books, picked up a hat and a walking stick, and ventured out.  A short walk brought me to a little blink-and-you-miss-it enclave of urban woodland, an enclave I discovered only within the last year on one of my walks around my new neighborhood.  The spot is so well hidden that I never knew it before, even though for the first four years we lived in this city Wife and I had an apartment no more than a mile away.  But we never had any idea.

So I sat reading in the shade of a couple large trees, for – oh gosh, I suppose it must have been another couple of hours – feeling the breeze and waving once when a young family strolled past.  When I came to the end of a major section in my book – I'm reading Dorothy Bryant's Confessions of Madame Psyche and just got to the point in 1930 where she is evicted from the campground in the woods where she had tried to establish a commune – I picked up my book and my stick and went walking some more, down past some of the better-known scenic spots in town where I sat and contentedly watched the day go past.  Then I strolled back to my apartment, rested some more, and finally decided it was time to write a couple of posts for the blog.  But I'll break off in another hour and a half or so to make dinner ... I've found a recipie that looks tasty on the page so I want to see how it comes off in reality.  

Actually after a few weeks of eating very simply – I was trying to savce money in the aftermath of my trip to Peru – I've been cooking a lot lately.  I probably could have gotten by this week on leftovers and salad without needing to cook still more.  But hell – it's Easter, right?  I'll cook some more, for the sheer fun of it as much as for the food, and then I'll have lots to hold me for the week without having to allocate time in the evenings to do anything more than re-heat.  It would be nice to have somebody to cook for, but even if it's just me I'd rather cook than not cook.  Not every night, perhaps, because my love of cooking vies with my laziness or poor planning to see who will win out on any given night.  But it's a gift I give myself on hplidays.

Happy Easter, all.

Other times Wife lost it

In digging out the last few stories I posted recently (here and here and here) I found some others as well.  I'll post a few of them here just to get them out and online; some of the others might take a bit more time to put in readable form.  And in some cases I start to wonder if these are stories I have already told: after six years and some of posts, it's easy to lose track.
__________

Hosea's log. Stardate January 13, 2005.  Wife had an attack that I described in an e-mail to Boyfriend 4 as follows:

…. Wife had an attack where she started snarling like an animal, making not-very-veiled threats to damage herself and/or the children, and insisting that nobody loved her or would care if anything happened to her; when I tried to hold her to tell her this wasn't true she began to struggle violently with me. I held her still on the bed by holding her wrists and pinning her legs, because I was at this point genuinely concerned about the consequences (to herself or others) if I let her go. Her response was to shriek as if possessed.

Actually that's not a bad image, because her voice got deeper and huskier and the look in her eyes was not anything she normally has. Her reason also left her; I told her more than once that if she stopped fighting with me I wouldn't pin her down, but her response to that was to fight harder ... the way an animal might. (The sounds coming out of her mouth were feral and inarticulate as well.) I don't know if she was actually bruised, but her skin is so sensitive that she bruises if she bumps into a table. So I bet she was….

She finally settled down, after shrieking incoherently for many minutes. (…I think it helped that the boys came in the room to see what was going on.) When she stopped fighting and snarling, she settled down into sobbing, at which point I concluded that there was no further danger and let her go. I think this has been building for a while. I believe it is the depression coming to a peak. ….

I tried calling you but got your answering machine. Anyway, here is the story of the evening. I have left out all the story building up to it, because I still need to feed the boys and get them to bed; but there was a long trail of anger and frustration leading to this moment….

Oh, she did ask me to call Boyfriend 3. … I gave him basically the same description. He said that one of his ex-wives used to experience the same thing on rare occasions; also that he would pray for her and put her on his church's prayer line, but then after a few minutes Wife was willing to talk to him. That seems to have helped her collect herself, too.

__________

Hosea's log.  Stardate spring 2002.

During the spring of 2002, Wife had an extended bad spell. One Sunday in March, I took the boys down to visit my parents; I worked on taxes with my mother, while the boys played. Later that evening we had dinner and a small birthday party for my father. Wife stayed home because she wasn’t feeling well; also, at that point, she and my father got on badly and I thought they would each be happier without the other. But the next day, while Son 1 was at baseball practice, she became very angry with me. She began to accuse me of trying to take the children away from her permanently, and nothing I could say would shake this belief from her – even though there was no rational connection between anything I had done and that conclusion.

In early May of that year, she called me at the office one afternoon and insisted I come home immediately. She had just gotten off the phone with the hospital trying to arrange something about her upcoming gastric bypass surgery, and something had gone wrong. As a result she threw a tantrum, barricading herself in the bedroom and throwing clocks and other things into the bathroom and out the window. Her niece was staying with us at that time, and so she shepherded the kids into another room and tried to look after Wife. When I got home, I tried to calm Wife down; when that didn’t work, I held her wrists and held her down onto the bed to restrain her forcibly from doing more damage. She snarled and fought and shouted, but finally the fit passed and I let her up. Later I called the hospital and worked out whatever the problem was. I also cleaned up the mess.

__________

Hosea's log.  Stardate spring 1996.

 

She went into a similar downward spiral while pregnant with Son 1, our oldest. She had been taken off her medication (then Prozac) because of her pregnancy, and one evening I came home from work to find the kitchen a complete disaster. She had thrown food and dishes across it, smashing glass jars and spilling molasses, soy sauce, and many other foods all across the floor. She was sitting on the floor surrounded by broken glass and all this other stuff, playing with the broken glass by tracing it along her arms. When I asked her what had happened, her voice sounded almost serene (but crazy); she said that she was fine and that she was just playing with broken glass. I got her out of there and cleaned up; I cleaned up the kitchen; I called her OB/GYN to say that if she couldn’t get her Prozac she was going to have to have an abortion so that she could have her medicines again; and finally I got a hold of a psychiatrist who had seen her years before (when she was hospitalized for psychiatric reasons). I made an appointment, and at that appointment he told her that after the first trimester Prozac is completely safe for pregnant mothers. She went back on her medicines and things got better.

Lessons learned

Yesterday I posted some fragments of a journal that I kept very briefly back in 1987, and I paged through a lot more of it figuring out what to post.  When I decided to drag it out, I remembered it as mostly an itemization of the things Wife did that made me so frustrated; and I figured it would be interesting to see how many of them continued into more recent times.  What I found is that I spent a lot more time talking about myself (too bad blogging technology hadn't been invented yet!) and trying to sort through my own thoughts and feelings.  But this meant I had an opportunity to compare how I thought then to how I think now.  Have I learned anything?  Do I do anything different?  Or has the time just been one long dreary round of repetition, a maze where I never find the cheese?

I think I see a few things I've learned.  There may be more.  And of course there are probably things I should have learned but haven't ... but that's a different post.  So, in no particular order, here's a list:

• Back then I tried to guess what Wife meant and what she wanted by listening to her tone of voice and interpolating ... reading between the lines.  Now I'm more likely to ask.
• Back then I tried to give the answer I thought she wanted to hear, which of course made it important to read between the lines so I could figure out what she wanted but wasn't saying.  Now I'm less likely to do that and more likely to give a straight-up answer.
• Back then I would not -- seemingly could not! -- talk openly about sensitive emotional issues.  Or sex.  All I could do was hint at what I meant in elegant, roundabout ways.  It's no surprise that the other person (typically Wife) never understood what I meant.  I've gotten better about this, but not what I would call good.  That is to say, I'm blunt enough with you, and that's a benefit because it gives me practice saying what I mean so that I can say it to other people ... people I talk to in person.  But a few days ago I looked back at some e-mails I exchanged with Debbie back in September -- maybe half a year ago -- where she was bringing up some of the very same issues she brought up when she broke it off.  And my replies had the same brittle elegance about them.  I got to the point after a while, but I should have rewritten them before hitting "Send" to take out the first few paragraphs and go straight to the meat of the subject.  And in four years with D, I never told her most of what I thought about the things she did and said.
• Back then I tried to solve Wife's problems, rather than letting her solve them herself.  I am a lot better at this now.  I realize that I have enough trouble solving my own problems [wan smile] that the last thing I need is to take on others as well.
• Back then I was tied up in knots from not knowing what I wanted in even simple, mundane situations.  Wife used to needle me by saying, "Chocolate or vanilla, Hosea, pick one."  I look at the very same dilemmas now, or ones just like them, and I think "How is it even possible not to know what you want here? How is it possible not to know what you like and value?"  To me nowadays, making those kinds of decisions seems a lot easier ... something like breathing.  The explanation is that back then I was afraid of what I wanted.  Part of the reason I dithered for so many years about Wife's infidelities is that one part of me wanted her to be a free-loving free spirit, because I felt my own life to be too pinched, narrow, and constrained.  I wanted her to be a breath of fresh air.  But at the same time I knew from experience (She started fucking Boyfriend 1 a scant two years after we were married.) that dealing with the emotional turbulence of an affair was painful, and I knew I was too shy and fearful to reciprocate by finding a girlfriend of my own.  (I had been married twenty-four years before I started the affair with D.)  Anyway, the point is that I knew what I wanted but I was afraid of getting it, and afraid even of admitting it to myself.  So I took refuge in telling myself that these situations were "complicated" (they weren't) and in hiding behind a wall of words.
            There's one irony in my bringing up the whole question of not knowing what I want ... namely that in career-planning I still have the same basic problem.  I believe the root cause to be different, however.  I believe that in the case of career-planning the issue is that I can identify things I like doing and things I don't like doing, but I can't figure out how to piece together a dream job that's any different from the lackluster job I have now.  Also I figure that if I were actually to change careers, it would mean making a lot less money, which in turn means I should wait another six years until Son 2 is out of college.  And by then I'll be 59 years old.  Hmmm.  Maybe the problem is partly a lack of courage, but I'm going to keep telling myself it's a lack of imagination.  You remember that line I quoted recently from the movie The Big Chill?  "Rationalizations are more important than sex ...." 
• Back then I spent a lot of energy worrying about Who I Was.  You know ... my identity, my Self, my True Will, my destiny ... all that happy horseshit.  I wrote, several times, of working hard to kill off my Old Self (the Identity I had developed growing up, and deployed all through college and graduate school); and I fretted over what New Self would take his place.  This is related to the point I just made above, about wanting Wife precisely because she was so different from me, so that by being married to her I could be forced to change instead of settling into a rut.  I don't spend my energy on that kind of worry any more, or not much.  I suppose I haven't completely gotten over it -- I'm thinking of deeply embarrassing posts like this two-part one here and here.  But I think these days that's the exception and not the rule.  At least consciously I think I'm more likely to say that it's not very helpful to think about my Identity or Destiny, ... maybe it's more practical just to think about the choices I happen to make today, and later on the choices I happen to make tomorrow.  (Compare the argument here.)  In my more metaphysical moods, I can even argue that the Self or the Identity don't exist at all.  But I sure did worry about this sort of thing years ago.
• Back then I thought it really mattered what perfect strangers thought about me.  I had forgotten all about it, but apparently Wife had talked about going to Pagan Spirit Gathering some time around then, and had suggested I come with her.  (You remember that back then she was Wiccan, right?)  And it seems I had a huge amount of anxiety about this.  Part of it was related to the free-love atmosphere of the place: it had been at an earlier Pagan Spirit gathering that she met Boyfriend 1.  But part of it was wrapped around mental pictures of myself there, feeling that I had to explain to everyone that I wasn't really a Pagan but I was there because my wife was, and at the same time realizing perfectly well how really dorky that would have sounded.  And honestly, in real life, who the hell could possibly have cared?  Last year I joined Debbie on at least three Buddhist retreats without ever once feeling I had to explain to anybody that I'm not a Buddhist.  (And in reality I'm not sure I can tell whether I'm a Buddhist or not.)  So maybe I've made a little progress on that front.         

Time to sign off.  Maybe I'll think of more later. 

Blast from the past -- Back in 1987

Posting stories from the past got me thinking about one that's really old, but that may date from the first time I ever wrote down any account of my troubled marriage with Wife.  So I rummaged around a bit and dug out the journal that I started keeping back then ... and kept up for three weeks before abandoning it.  (sigh)  Still, there's a lot in there reflecting about me and my marriage, about how things went and why I reacted in a certain way.  I don't know how much of this I'll end up posting, but at any rate some of it ....
__________

Hosea's log, star date October 23, 1987.
Location: a city we haven't lived in for a quarter century now.  The time is a full twenty years before I started this blog.  Dear God but that's a long stretch of time ....
What follows is what I wrote then, with minor edits for readability, etc.  Every so often I intrude editorial comments in a different type face, between square brackets. 

I tried to hit Wife last night.  We tussled for a minute and then I broke off and went back into the bedroom.  The issue was seemingly immaterial, but managed to be more frustrating than I could handle ... apparently.  Wife's friend Laguna was working late, at a company a few blocks away from here; and Wife was going to take her some of our leftovers to microwave for dinner.  A simple question: should she take some of this or some of that?  I didn't much care which, but she kept pursuing the question; worse, each time she said or asked something, I thought she was suggesting the other option from the one she had suggested a minute before.  I suppose I was involved at all because I was in the kitchen at the time and she wanted me to put something on a plastic plate and wrap it up.  But I got frustrated enough with her rapid-fire changes of tack that I left the kitchen, went to sit down, kibbitzed briefly, and let her do it.  A lot of our decisions seem to go like this.  I don't even remember -- after she had that mostly taken care of -- what she said that made me so mad.  I think she said something about not understanding why I was making such a big deal over something so tiny.  My impression was precisely the opposite -- that she was the one making it difficult by constantly sending mixed signals about what she wanted to do.  [Let me break in from today to point out what should be obvious -- viz., that another problem is I was trying to read her mind instead of just asking her, "I dunno Babe, what do you want?"]  As usual the real problem was that we weren't understanding each other; but this particular accusation -- that the problem was my doing -- infuriated me.  It's similar to the last time I tried to hit her, when we were trying to go somewhere and I kept waiting for her before we could, and she later bitched about our late start and about her having to wait for me.  Of course we were waiting for each other.  I wouldn't have gotten so angry that time either, except that (a) this is another longstanding problem, and (b) I was accused of being -- all by myself -- the party at fault.  This feeling, compounded with the sense that this was part of an endless cycle (since it has happened so many times between us) resulted in a combination of pain and despair that distilled briefly into murderous fury.  I say this with only minimal exaggeration: for a brief moment -- both times -- I really wanted to kill her.

[It goes on for several more paragraphs, as I talk about my depression, about my fanatical need to be clearly understood (I hope I've eased up a little on that in the interim), and so on.  Several days later I pick up the story, after Wife and I made time to "talk about the incident."  I relate that she said I must have a lot of repressed, pent-up anger in me towards her, to be able to explode like that. Mulling this, I write ...]

It is true that I can get awfully angry at her, and that in many ways she is quite a burden.  The simple fact that my time at home is not my own is painful enough for someone like me who cherishes privacy and solitude.  I would happily do less housework and fix less elaborate and less regular meals, and so forth, to have time to read or think or write or enjoy the silence.  But if Wife is home too there is none of that -- I feel that I should be busy doing something domestic, or else I will hear later about the problems when it is not done.

Then there are the ways in which she is dependent on me.  Weekdays I fix three meals a day.  She says that she prefers homemade lunches to school lunches [in those days, Wife was a schoolteacher], but if I don't have time to make her a lunch she certainly won't do it.  In fact she lies abed late enough that if I didn't make breakfast and iron her clothes I doubt she would ever get to work on time -- or at any rate fed and pressed.  If she needs to go somewhere new, I have to write out directions for her and go over them as with a child -- she found her way around well enough when job hunting the last time we were apart, but if she can palm the job off on me so much the better.  [The invention of the GPS was one of the high points of our marriage. No joke.]  Ditto with finding her keys when they get lost.  Ditto with balancing the bank statement.  I see why her mother drags her feet about sewing for Wife -- she wants Wife to learn to do it herself.  But she won't learn while her mother is alive, if ever: this I can guarantee.

Then there are the things she does that are irritating in themselves, like leaving her clothes and shoes strewn about the house.  Like preaching doom to herself so convincingly that she concludes nothing can improve her situation ... and then telling me at great length all about how hopeless everything is, in tones that suggest she wants my advice on how -- miraculously -- to make everything all better.  Like the sheer complexity and busy-ness that attends life with Wife: the constant scheduling around doctor's appointments, the train of friends calling or showing up, the fact that into every block of free time she schedules three or four mutually conflicting projects and then gets upset when she is perpetually behind....  It's all very draining, which is why it would be such a relief if she did leave me.  [Wife always said she would leave me if I ever struck her, so part of the "talk" a couple days before was about whether my almost striking her "counted" or not.] 

[Then the next day I picked it up again right where I left off, with ...]

On the other hand, I would also be crushed by it.  First of course would be the recurrence of all the loneliness and depression that I felt as a bachelor, the sense of permanent exclusion from the world of social relationships....  The cold, abandoned loneliness that I used to feel so often is not something I have felt since meeting Wife and it would surely return.  Plus there is enormous comfort in living with someone.  I need solitude too, but to be totally cut off from others is vertiginous and disorienting, and life too easily loses its beauty or meaning....  In a real sense, Wife is my hearth.  It is her presence that makes my dwelling a Home, ... that gives the place warmth and light.  Then there is sex .... [And so it goes, on and on, at very great length.]      

Blast from the past -- The weekend that Wife was arrested

So after much promising, I have finally posted this story ... as a separate page linked to this blog, because it is so damned long.  You can find it here:

http://hoseasblog.blogspot.com/p/the-weekend-that-wife-was-arrested.html

Any sane person would ask, after reading all this, "Hosea why in God's name did you spring her from jail? Why did you pay thousands of dollars in bail? If you'd played your cards right you could have kept her in jail for a long time after a weekend like this, and think how much pain and heartache you would have saved yourself!"

I've thought about it over and over, and I can come up with only one plausible answer to the question why I acted as I did.  That's how abused spouses act.  Over and over, that's how they act.

Which means I have to identify myself as an abused spouse.  Although, all things considered, the identification might not be that far off.  Read for yourself and decide what you think.

Romance or community?

I'm starting to slip on this "Post once a day" goal I set myself, but maybe I can catch up.  I was thinking of posting my last dream of last night, just before I woke up this morning, but that seemed just a bit too desperate.  Surely I can think of more material than that.  Well I have thought of a couple other topics, actually, but I think they'll take a while to flesh out and I'm trying to write this on my lunch hour.  So I'll have to try for something shorter.

One thing I have mulled over recently, though, is a comment Debbie made to me last fall, in an e-mail where she was (even then) feeling her way through some of her mixed feelings about our relationship.  She said that on the whole she preferred to meet her own social needs "in community" rather than in a romantic relationship, because in her experience intense personal relationships were always unsafe.  She instanced, for example, her relationship with her parents when she was growing up: her mother was emotionally unavailable, and her father (by the time she was an adolescent) was drinking and violent.  And at the time she used this as a springboard for talking some more about us.

What I have been mulling, though, is this distinction: romance or "community"?  What does it really mean, and what are the differences between the two?  I take "community" in this case to refer to a circle of friends.  Certainly Debbie talked often about belonging to several interlocking communities: a couple of sanghas, her church community, her coworkers, ... maybe some others.  Now that she is enrolled in a chaplaincy program and has moved to another city, she's got a new church, a new sangha (or two), her fellow students, an Al-Anon group ... in short, multiple interlocking communities.  And this is how she most enjoys meeting her needs for sociability, for companionship.

It's a bit of a foreign concept for me, because I don't plunge myself into communities in the same way.  I get along comfortably with all the people at work, but there is maybe only one with whom I am partway down the path of making him a friend in the sense that we talk about our private lives.  I have been a steady member of the UU sangha for close to a year now -- maybe even a little more -- and I guess I'm settling into that.  I helped out at an event last weekend where the sangha volunteered to do something nice for the UU church that hosts us, and I was able to ask a member of the sangha to drive me home after my colonoscopy a couple months ago.  But I see the people there at sangha, and not outside of it.  So I don't really have anything like the extended network of friends that Debbie has, and that she makes a point of having around her at all times.

Probably I shouldn't even try to speculate about the differences between these two ways of being sociable, when I don't have the experience of her way.  But I can't help wondering about it.  Somehow it seems to me that it is easier to put on an act for the members of a "community" than for a romantic partner, to pretend to be a better person than you are.  Somehow it seems to me that, for good or ill, you have to be more honestly yourself in a romantic relationship -- at any rate, once the rose-colored fog burns off -- because you get closer to each other and (try to) tear down all the barriers in between.  I might be wrong.  Maybe if you live "in community" the way Debbie does you get so close to people that you can't hide behind niceness.  Maybe what I'm really thinking of is that it's easier to put on an act with strangers.  And she's not talking about strangers.  But my coworkers aren't exactly strangers to me.  They aren't strangers, but I'll wager they don't know most of my faults.

I guess I don't really know how to compare these two ways of being sociable.  Maybe I should mull them some more.  But I've told you my first thought.    

Why do I have no Internet connection?

In a roundabout way, this topic is linked with the last one.  It's still Sunday night as I type this, and I hope I have less to say because the last post (about drinking) took me an hour or more.  But let me try to crank this out quickly.  [For whatever it's worth, I didn't finish it until Monday night. Oh well.]

When I took possession of my apartment, almost a year ago by now, I made appointments to turn on the gas and the electricity.  Water and trash are included in the rent.  I decided not to install a phone line because I've got a cell phone, and why exactly do I need two phones?  (Wife has a land line as well as her cell phone, but I've never once claimed that Wife's spending makes any logical sense.)  I don't own a television, so I didn't bother to connect cable.  And I did not set up Internet service.  To this day I haven't.

This irritates the boys no end, when they come to stay with me.  I often have to go to work during the day, leaving them to entertain themselves until I can get away and come home.  For Son 2 this usually means reading.  But Son 1 owns a laptop (Son 2 doesn't), so his idea of entertainment is to surf the Web.  Bad news dude – Dad doesn't have an Internet connection.  Can't do that.  So he plays downloaded games instead; if both of them are here at the same time, they may entertain each other or go for a walk around town or something.  (At least once last year Son 1 went out to the movies.)  But I never fail to hear from them that "At least Mom has an Internet connection – unlike some people!"  It has almost become a running joke.  I think they chalk it up to my being stingy.  (Wife has long told anyone who will sit still to listen how stingy I am. For my part I think she spends at delusional levels. Maybe we're both right.)

But really, why don't I have an Internet connection in my apartment?

I've thought about it.  In some ways it would be convenient: for example, I could post these blog entries when I write them instead of having to queue them for later.  I could check movie times without having to get a newspaper.  Maybe I'd finally get my photos from Peru posted online where the family can see them – or at any rate I could do a lot of other things without having to pack up my computer and walk to the public library where the wifi is free.  I could check my e-mail from the comfort of my own apartment ....

But wait.  Check my e-mail?  Do I want to be able to do that all the time?  If I can then pretty soon I'm expected to; pretty soon I have to.  If I'm plugged in all the time, then I'll have to be plugged in all the time.  Work will be able to find me.  Friends and family will be able to find me.  Human contact is great, of course; I'm not knocking it.  But there's a reason we don't live at the office.  And there's a reason it's nice to have "a place of your own" ... even if it's not much, or even if (like me) you don't want it to be much because you don't want to have to take care of it.  Sometimes you just gotta get away, and not having Internet at home is a great excuse.

There's more.  I know how seductive the Intnernet can be.  More times than I could count have I gone online to look up one little fact, then seen an interesting link and followed it up, ... and by the time I come to myself three or four hours have passed.  My eyes are a little glazed, my mind is a little dazed, my soul is not a bit refreshed ... and yet somehow a large chunk of my day has slipped through my fingers never to return.  Thich Nhat Hanh is right to refer to the Internet under the aspect of alcohol or a drug: it induces the same forgetfulness, it nudges with the same compulsiveness, and it gives nothing back in return.  It buys your life and pays with ashes.  You'd think that with this opinion I'd never use the Internet except for a defininte purpose, that I'd be as vigilant about Internet usage as I try to be about alcohol, ... that I could make it not be a problem.  But I'm not so sure.  At the very least, I don't trust myself to do this.  (You notice I haven't given up drinking either.)  So instead I just make it difficult to access.  Yes, I can connect to the Internet over the weekend, but to do it I have to drive into the office, or walk to the Library, or at least find a Starbucks somewhere.  I have to take conscious, deliberate steps.  And that slows me down.  It makes it less likely that I will piss away my weekend and not even get the delicious feeling of laziness in return.

This means I'm depriving myself of one of the drugs that could distract me from anxiety, but I find myself of two minds about this.  One side says, "Good. If you're anxious then deal with the anxiety rather than covering it up by surfing the Web."  Interestingly the other side agrees about the prescription (no Internet) but for the opposite reason: it says, "Internet browsing may distract you from your anxiety; but unlike booze or food or sex, it does not alleviate it."  When I'm done, I am just as anxious as I was before ... maybe a little more so.  This is what I mean by saying that I'm not refreshed.  It's kind of like eating cardboard – it keeps the jaws busy, but when I stop to pay attention I realize there's no flavor and it doesn't really make me feel any better.  If I'm going to feel the low-level chronic anxiety anyway, I'd rather live in the real world while I'm doing it ... surrounded by real, tangible objects with real colors and textures, and feeling real honest-to-God boredom rather than some cheap ersatz  imitation of interest.

Of course not everybody feels this way.  But if you've ever read Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

And I suppose I should add that this is a general comment about the medium.  If some of you start writing again, I promise to make an exception for you.  I'll still have to do it from the Library on weekends, though.