The Lutheran Geek

OK, geekiness time. Most people hate a blinking cursor in a terminal – that huge blinking square is irritating beyond belief. Strangely, though, a blinking caret (the thin line you see in most text editors) is quite all right by most people. However, in their infinite wisdom, GNOME decided that all users want the caret and cursor to behave the same, and have hard-wired the cursor behavior to be the same as the caret behavior, which is stupid. At least they did for a few versions; they are now decoupled again, but they don’t give you an easy way to turn off the blinking. Here is the magic incantation to access the secret setting to turn off blinking:

gconftool-2 -s /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/cursor_blink_mode -t string off

Done! now you can hack in peace.

So this morning, I laid out my best understanding of what sin is. Short version: it’s bad, yo. No surprise there.  Historically, there are Seven Deadly Sins:

• lust
• gluttony
• greed
• sloth
• wrath
• envy
• pride

Really, though, you can boil those Seven down to two: covetousness (lust, gluttony, greed, envy) and self-idolatry (sloth and pride). In my opinion, wrath is not so much a sin in and of itself as it is an overreaction to either covetousness or self-idolatry. What’s interesting is that these are both focused on the self and leave out the most important type of sin that I examined as part of the Ten Commandments: ungratefulness. You could say “ungratefulness towards God”, but really, you don’t even have to be a religious believer to understand that this world is a pretty darn amazing place, and to have a sense of entitlement is ruinous and leads to all other destructive behavior.

(Just so we have our taxonomy complete, here’s where I think the Ten Commandments go here (using the numbering that has the first four as the God-related ones):

• Ungratefulness: Commandments 1-5 (the four involving honoring God, plus honoring mommy and daddy)
• Self-idolatry: Commandment 6 (arguable, but murder seems to imply you value your life more than another) and 9 (“I’m too important to be bothered with telling the truth”)
• Covetousness: Commandments 7 (acting on sexual coveting), 8 (acting on material coveting), and 10 (the act of coveting itself)

A stretch, but eh, I’m no theologian. )

Where I’m going with all this is to examine why a focus on sin is harmful towards those suffering with depression, clinical or otherwise. I’ve had many brushes with depression; thankfully they’ve been relatively fleeting and not chronic. My understanding of it will, of course, be colored by my own experience, but I’ll give it a shot.

When you are depressed, everything is seen to be worthless, most of all yourself. Every action you take is surrounded by fear of the consequences of those actions, expecting the worst possible result at every turn. The outside world seems worthless to you; you want to completely unplug from it and from other people. In essence, you become a twisted mirror image of a healthy (albeit still flawed) person: where a normal person has excess pride, you have an excess of self-deprecation; your apathy overtakes any possible covetousness; worst of all, you seem to others to be utterly ungrateful for the world around you, which I proposed is the worst of the three types of sin. It’s a double-whammy: you see nothing good in the world externally or internally, and the world has a large chance of misunderstanding you as being self-centered and ungrateful.

Depression can lead to behavior that can also be seen as covetous or self-idolatrous. In my own experience, depressive thoughts do not fully overtake you, but rather you are left with a longing for normalcy, and in so doing begin to wistfully look at others, thinking their lives to be perfect and free of the same crushing doubts that you are experiencing. In so doing, you are wishing for that which you don’t have in the thinking that it will cure all your ills and return you to the land of the Normal, because it’s more important to be Normal than anything else. (Remember the third word in the title of this post, “norms”? I’ll come back to the issue of norms in my next post, but keep it in mind.) Finally, the very act of being so focused on your own well-being is a warped version of worshiping the self. Even though you are not idolizing the self, but rather demonizing and cursing it, by doing so you put yourself as the cause of all the negativity you experience in your life. You envision yourself as a sort of twisted anti-God: not a Satan, as it were, but a being who inflicts incalculable harm on everything around yourself.

Now imagine having all these burdens put on yourself by depression – seeing yourself as an unintentionally malevolent force, unable to be grateful for all that you have, and longing for a different life. Switch around the attitudes from overly dark to overly light, and you have the standard me-first Westerner: can’t do wrong, master of your own domain (no, not in the Seinfeld sense), always wanting more and more. This is the person to whom the Confession is aimed: it is a chance for a good but flawed person (i.e. most of us) to acknowledge his shortcomings and plead for forgiveness.

However, envision yourself as the depressed person reading these words. In one sense, perhaps you are reading a description of yourself that you already “know”: I fall short, I am a bad person, etc. The depressed person will not see this as cleansing, but as a further trip down that dark path of self-loathing, thinking, “wow, even God thinks I’m terrible”. The damage has been done, and all you can think is about those words you said: “I have sinned…” How hurt and confused you must feel. Once you say those words, nothing else that is said matters; the absolution will fall on deaf ears, in all likelihood, and you will spend the remainder of the time stuck in your thoughts, unable to receive anything good.

Part 3 will examine religious (at least, Christian) norms, how they conflict with the needs of the depressed, and what should change in that regard.

(As a postscript, I strongly suspect I am not the first person to pursue this line of thinking, and I’m sort of winging it right now. Suggestions on outside sources would be most welcome as I seek to explore this matter further.)

It’s Lent, which means that it’s time to fire up the Sackcloth and Ashes Machine in most mainline Christian churches. Now, the Catholics have this area pretty well perfected compared to most Protestant churches (I can’t speak to Orthodox faiths and their attitude towards sin, but never mind). However, we Lutherans like to dwell on sin as well. Most long-time ELCA Lutherans can recite the Brief Order of Confession and Forgiveness from memory. Here’s the money paragraph:

We confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. We have sinned against you [God] in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbor as ourselves. For the sake of your Son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us. Forgive us, renew us, and lead us, so that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways, to the glory of your holy name. Amen.

That’s pretty standard wordage among the various ways to do mass confessions in various churches. The church I’ve been attending, Immanuel Lutheran here in Chicago, tends not to do the Confession on most standard Sundays. However, during Lent, they’ve broken it out. It makes sense as Lent is supposed to be a more somber time, meant to encourage self-reflection on the nature of our humanity. Even still, I am uncomfortable about this sort of self-flagellation. Granted, merely confessing our shortcomings falls way short of, say, whipping your back with a chain. But my problem is that, for someone suffering mentally and thinking themselves to be a permanently defective person each and every day, a recounting of how awful we are doesn’t help. It should be noted that the Order mentioned above is for confession and forgiveness; that is, the pastor announces the absolution of all our sins. But I will hope to explain why this is unsatisfactory in my mind to say “yeah you suck, but hey, God loves you anyway”.

First, we need to define the nature of sin. There’s about 2000 years of theological thought that I would have to cover to see the evolution of thought about what sin is, but I think I’ll just stick with a definition from Luther:

…we deny to those propagated according to carnal nature not only the acts, but also the power or gifts of producing fear and trust in God. For we say that those thus born have concupiscence, and cannot produce true fear and trust in God.

“Concupiscence” basically means lust, greed; it encompasses the desire to cling to earthly things. This clinging is thought to be the root of (or at least a fairly large contributor to) all earthly sin, and is explicitly stated as such in the writings of Paul:

For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, in their eagerness to get rich, have wandered away from the faith and caused themselves a lot of pain.

Thus, sin is turning away from God in order to pursue earthly goods. What is frustrating to me is that most superficial investgations of sin that I have heard about in the past stop here, and assume that the reader understands that ignoring God is the worst wrong that a person can do. Let’s go a little further and understand what is meant by this, and try to make our definition of sin a little more concrete.

A good place to start, of course, is the Ten Commandments:

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.

Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. For six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.

Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

You shall not murder.

You shall not commit adultery.

You shall not steal.

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

These are the basic rules we are expected to live by, handed down by God to the Hebrew exiles during the exodus, and passed down to us today. We can split them into two chunks; the first through fourth Commandments which dictate our relation to God, and the remaining six which dictate interpersonal relationships. These latter Commandments are easier to understand, since they have clear social utility by laying out a basic minimal definition of justice. You could argue that honoring your parents are not strictly necessary to have justice, and while true, there is quite a bit of social utility in keeping your parents in high regard: it provides an incentive for people to have children and to raise them well, knowing that their children, if they are instilled with a sense of justice, will be able to care for them when they age and are no longer able to look after themselves. The other of these latter commandments speak for themselves: murder (premeditated or otherwise), adultery, theft, false witness, and covetousness are uniformly ruinous to societies, and must be proscribed.

Let us examine the first four commandments: you shall have no god before God; you shall worship only God; you shall not misuse God’s name; you shall keep the Sabbath holy. God provides a justification for these rules; God states that it was God who created the world in six days and rested on the seventh; who brought the Hebrews out of slavery; who ultimately is unwilling to tolerate those who would consider any other entity greater than God. All this presupposes the existence of God and all seems a bit harsh in the light of the Christian message of absolution, but let’s take a broader view of what God is asking here. (The first two Commandments are actually a bit redundant; in fact, the Catholic and Lutheran tradition is to combine them into the single First Commandment, and later break the sentence describing covetousness into two Commandments, first proscribing coveting your neighbor’s house, then coveting your neighbor’s possessions.)

God is basically commanding a sense of gratefulness here. God is saying, “Look, the world is an amazing place. You were born into it, and have all these resources at your command. The work you do is certainly important, but the very existence of the world is something you should recognize and always keep at the forefront of your mind. To that end, don’t be flip about all of this; don’t instill yourself with a sense of entitlement. Be grateful! You have been given these amazing gifts; recognize them as such and don’t take them for granted.”

Ignoring this message is the main source of what we should consider to be “sin”, and it’s very important for certain to recognize that a sense of me-first entitlement is what leads us to destructive behavior. But what is ignored in all this talk about sin, entitlement, self-destruction, and so on, is a discussion of what people with real self-hatred – that is, depression – go through. What does this talk of sin do for them to build them up? Can it do ANYTHING to build them up? That’ll be covered in my next post…

I found out today it will be “three to four weeks” until I am able to close on my condo. This comes one week after the nominal close date specified in the contract I signed back in June, a date the selling agent had agreed to in advance. This whole situation is frustrating beyond belief. I hiave never felt so powerless over a situation. Everyone on “my side” is assuring me that they are working their hardest to resolve this situation. But there’s nothing I can do. The ironic part of all this is that my preparedness to get everything lined up for the new condo is actually working against me. I’ve had to call ATT, DirecTV, Comcast, etc. to let them know that, no, I am not actually moving when I said I was.

So now I go into a holding pattern. Thankfully, I was able to extend my lease of my apartment in Evanston for a month while this nonsense gets sorted out. There’s really just nothing to say. I was hoping to make a post here explain the process and what’s holding me up, but frankly, I just don’t have the energy right now. I’ve been spending too much time today just feeling defeated. It’s really all I can muster right now; just that feeling of “well crap, there’s nothing I can do”. Everything’s on hold: my new place to live, the settling in, my parents coming to visit my new place, getting a dog. All of it has to wait. It’s all incredibly unfair; I just want to scream and cry, but what good can that do?

Ugh. That’s about all I can muster now. Just, ugh.

So I’ve been listening to Pandora Radio a bunch lately. It is an amazing site, especially to test-drive new artists. In my case, I’ve been listening to stations based on Imogen Heap and Regina Spektor. They’re both solo female artist singer-songwriters, but their styles differ quite a bit. Imogen tends to do a lot of heavily-overdubbed songs with layers on layers of vocals and various instruments, with the vocals occasionally transformed via a vocoder, notably in her famous and gorgeous song “Hide and Seek“. Regina Spektor comes from the anti-folk movement in NYC, a stupidly-named scene that takes a lot of the musical traditions of Dylan and such and carries them forward to the present day with various lyrical themes. Her music is spare; about half of her songs are just her and a piano. “Samson” is a song from her latest album that came out a couple years ago, a gorgeous little ditty about first love viewed in retrospect.

Inspiring music. Gorgeous, amazing songs that make me wish I could write music like this. It’s so sucky. I played violin and piano for years, but as a kid, I just never got into it. I was much more into playing games on my Nintendo than practicing those instruments. Perhaps it was my way of passive-aggresively rebelling against authority and all the duties I felt were pressing in on me. I blew it, in any case. I could go on psychoanalzying myself, but the point of all this was to say, just, wow, I really wish I could get these kind of soundscapes in my mind that these people seem to be able to do. One thing I want to do with my new condo (when I actually can move into it! arrrrgh) is pick up a keyboard and start trying to relearn some piano chops and try my had at a little composition with Garage Band. I have no illusions of ever becoming anything like Imogen or Regina (and what is it with me and female artists?…), but I’d just love to be creative again somehow. WoW is fun and all, but it is ultimately not at all a creative endeavor, in the literal sense that nothing is created through your time playing the game. It’s the social aspect that makes it interesting, and why I’m still with the group of friends I’ve been with for almost 2 years now, save a couple months early last year.

Meh, as usual, I’m rambling more than saying anything interesting. But yeah. Friday afternoons are a great time to think about life, since you don’t have much else to do.

Peace.

Oy, I’ve been a total slackass about blogging lately. Lots of stuff going on. Orbitz is history, and I’ve been working as a contractor for a printing middleman company called InnerWorkings. The headquarters are in the old Montgomery Ward warehouse on Chicago Ave. right on the Chicago River. This building is almost 100 years old, but you’d never know it – it’s been completely gutted and refurbished to make a brand-spanking-new office complex.

It’s also not too far from… my new condo! Well, not “mine” yet, but my offer was accepted last week, so I’ve now started down the path of having to hoard a ridiculous amount of money for the down payment, closing fees, inspections, and God-knows-whatever-else between now and the actual closing day, which is tentatively July 21. In the interim, I’m learning a ton about mortgages, short sales, and all sorts of the weird arcanery surrounding buying a home (or condo).

I’ll be honest – I’ve never been very good with money. Not that I’ve ever been in much trouble financially – I’ve done pretty well by the fact that I’m a techie guy and my skills are fairly well sought-after. So I’ve come into this whole process with a good deal of naivete. Fortunately, I’ve been working with people (my Realtor and loan agent in particular) who have been very knowledgable at telling me what I need to do, how to raise the money, and so forth. The one big thing I’ve had to do that was sort of against my will was liquidate a bunch of my Roth IRA holdings. Never a good thing to part with your retirement account, but I figured this was for a good cause since I was able to get such a good deal on this condo. Basically, it’s what is called a “short sale”, meaning the current owners are about to be foreclosed, and the bank wants to sell the property ASAP to get some sort of value on the soon-to-be-defunct mortgage. This means they’re less flexible in the terms, however, so I had to basically put in a single offer and hope it would be accepted – thankfully, it was. Now I have to spend the next 5-6 weeks scraping together every last dime to be able to show the banks that, yes, I can afford to do this and I am not totally bankrupt.

It’s all very crazy, and I’ve spent a couple recent nights lying awake in various states of panic as to how I was going to be able to pull all this together. Thankfully, it’s coming together nicely, it seems, so I’ll be able to sleep tonight, at least. More details (and pictures) as they come in…

So I’m leaving for a while for my parents’ place starting Friday 6/29 – I’ll be back in Chicago around on July 8. One thing I am going to try to do while gone is get my mind back in order. I have been spiraling pretty quickly down into a pseudo-depression yet again, and I’ve been lashing out at friends along the way, people who have gone out of their way to help me and listen to me. At least a few friends this past week have told me they’re fed up with it. The more tightly I cling, the more desperate I become, and it’s just getting worse. My greatest fear is losing friends – I just haven’t had much luck in keeping them because of my extreme self-consciousness. Every little thing – every well-meaning ribbing, misspoken word, everything negative becomes amplified. Everything positive becomes diminished. It’s worse than seeing the world in purely black and white with no shades of grey – eventually you only see black.

It’s even gotten to the point where it’s affecting my work – nothing I do there seems to matter, and these roller-coaster rides of emotion I’ve been on are getting worse and worse. What’s even more terrible is comparing my own situation with those around me – what the hell do I even have to complain about? I have a great job, loving parents, awesome friends. How dare I complain?

And yet, I do. It’s a tough spot to be in. So anyway, to those I’ve hurt (I’m talking especially to you, Muzz/Dave), I apologize. You guys, my friends, have given a lot of yourself that I cannot repay. Maybe I’ll find my way back to sanity, maybe I won’t. Please be assured that I’m trying, though. Also know that I’m not blaming anyone for the state I’m in – not even myself. It is what it is. I don’t expect pity or condolences or anything – I just wanted you guys to know where I am right now.

Wow. I guess that’s it. Butai made some thread about Karazhan and made a snide comment about how we banned Mallrat because “he took matters into his own hands” or whatever. I made a terse post about how, no, what he did fucked up our planned Kara run. Evidently that was a bannable offense.

Anyway, to my remaining Panda friends, you know who you are, and I still love you guys. To the other Pandas I don’t know, good luck. And to the person who banned me (whichever officer you are) and the other unnamed officers who continue to slather hate on me for no apparent reason, fuck you. I was nothing but nice and awesome to you guys for months. I decided to take a different turn when it comes to raiding, and I’ve been met with hatred and loathing from certain people at every turn. I raid with you for 8 months, and the minute I leave (with almost 300 net positive DKP), you have the fucking gall to call me  a LOOT WHORE? You had better take a good hard look at yourselves and figure out why you are so hateful and crabby. It has driven a LOT of very good people from Panda Attack, including me and many of my friends. I hope you’re proud of taking what some good people like Ikillah and Synic built up and driving it straight into the ground. So fuck off forever.

(12:50:36 PM) Peter: mooooooo
(12:50:51 PM) Jy: Bark
(12:51:01 PM) Peter: Whinny?
(12:51:46 PM) Jy: SQUALK!!!!
(12:51:51 PM) Peter: yeep!
(12:51:59 PM) Peter: /fish?
(12:53:16 PM) Jy: Kek
(12:53:27 PM) Peter: /smile

Strictly speaking, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are not addictive, but trying to discontinue its use can result in a condition known as “discontinuation syndrome“. Of all the SSRIs, Paxil, or paroxetine hydrochloride, is the most potent, and leads to the most severe cases of this syndrome. I know this first-hand since I’ve taken it for over seven years to combat social anxiety disorder as well as mild depressive symptoms. When I started experiencing more depressive thoughts in the past month, I decided it was time to up my prescription to 40 mg from the previous low 20 mg dose I was taking before. Last night, as I went to take my dose, I discovered that the night before, I had used up the last of the Paxil I had on-hand. I knew this would probably mean bad things for me today… and I was right.

For me, even going 36 hours without a dose of Paxil can result in a great deal of extra depression and hyper-sensitivity to emotions. Just this afternoon, a simple thing caused me to spin out of control and to the point of tears. It was not a negative thing at all, not hardly, but it brought up some terrible memories, and caused me to spend an hour or so just staring blankly into space. It is incredibly frustrating to deal with these negative feelings creeping back into my life. Noone deserves this sort of mental torture I put myself through… and yet I do it.

One thing I talk to my therapist about is how I put most of the negative aspects of a relationship on myself. That is, I don’t spend a whole lot of time stewing over what others have done to me, but rather I tend to spend the time thinking of what wrong I have done to others. Even the act of apologizing doesn’t help – when it’s not received well, or outright ignored, I find myself simply befuddled and upset at myself. If only I hadn’t blown up that one time! If only I knew what to say to make it up to them. If only I wasn’t such a jerk. If only I wasn’t such an idiot. If only I wasn’t bad…

And so it goes, leaving me feeling like the worst person on earth. I’m self-centered, lazy, thoughtless, jerky. I’m terrible with people. I will always be alone.

I find that these thoughts just refuse to go away altogether, and they get amplified when I am low on my drugs. It’s just flat-out frustrating. Others have gotten through much worse thoughts and situations than me, and yet I continue to wallow and tell myself how awful I am. Others have attempted suicide, some succeeded. I have had my share of thoughts, but never had the guts to act on them. I’ve never been quite depressed enough to really be truly “depressed”, so instead, I just feel lazy. I get scared, I feel unable to interact with anyone. I am a failure of a human being.

…see, but I’m not. I cognitively know that my struggles are the same ones everyone goes through, from the shyest guy on the block to alpha-males like Donald Trump – everyone has doubts, fears, that sort of thing. Days like today, though, make it feel like I’m the worst person on earth.