It’s your day.

Happy Birthday, son.

Wherever you are I hope you got everything you needed, a few things you wanted, and a nothing you didn’t.

Racism?

I’m a member of a few social networking sites. Myspace, Facebook, Atheist Nexus, and a place called OkCupid. OkCupid is an entertaining site as it mashes up a dating site like Yahoo personals or Match.com with a social network site like Myspace. I have some fun on there and have met a few entertaining people. But what sucks the hours right out of my day is the forums.

Just like any forum there are varied and sometimes quixotic topics ranging from “how many drinks would it take to sleep with the poster above you” to “critique my profile.” Today though, I was looking through the forums and ran across this topic titled “In the name of God…” It was started by a thirtysomething white male in response to a few emails he had received.  Apparently the original poster (OP) specifies on his profile that he is only looking for a single white female. The person who emailed the OP inquired about this and wondered if he would be willing to “give up on all other races and possible love connections just because they are not white.” The OP responed to this by relegating his choice in skin color on his potential mate to the same level as hair and eye color, weight, or height. The woman emailing the OP brought in God and made the OP out to be a racist and herself to be more enlightened because she’s a God-fearing woman and the OP must not be. What followed has been a flurry of topic responses calling him prejudiced, racist, a bigot, and many others. There are plenty of responses that back the OP, but far more that denounce his choice of potential mates.

So I have been wondering, is this man’s exclusion of several ethnicities from his pool of potential mates based on racism or on a measurement of attraction he has no conscious control over?

Poetry

I took a poetry class in the fall semester of 2008 and here is the outcome of that endeavor. I wrote several free-verse poems; Hate, I Run, and Splash. My favorites though were the ones with form. Hubris, a villanelle was the hardest of the bunch to draft. Reality, an Italian sonnet was a challenge because of the subject material, but still fun. Lastly, Skyline is the one I wanted to write from the very beginning of the class, but took the longest to write and was by far the most difficult. It is a series of haiku written about this picture. I don’t know the story behind it, nor do I know anything about him, but I hope the poem did the event justice.

• Hate
• Hubris
• I Run
• Reality
• Skyline
• Splash

You don’t say…

So I’m checking my email this afternoon and get a reply from a professor regarding a really late paper I turned in. (It was due November 10 and I turned it in yesterday.) At first I was completely terrified of reading his reply. I was so afraid he was going to tell me that I was going to get no points for the paper or that I had to have some serious audacity to turn in the paper so late. Surprisingly enough, none of that was in his message. It was short, to the point, and completely unexpected. In fact, I’m still dumbfounded and reeling from my initial read-through of his two sentence email.

He called me brilliant.

WTF, Mate?

I’ve slipped. Slipped back into a depressed slump. I’m trying to focus on my work and get back on track, but all I can seem to concentrate on is this near-overwhelming feeling that I need to lay down and cry. Right now I really wish I could do just that. I feel like there’s something welling up inside me and the stopper on my bottle won’t come loose; maybe if I was able to just get a good cry going I’ll feel better. I can’t though, maybe because in western American society it isn’t acceptable for men to show emotion at all let alone cry, but maybe it’s because I don’t really have anything to cry about.

I have three papers due in less than a week. In reality this shouldn’t be difficult to accomplish. I’m trying to work on one as I sit and write this, but as can be seen I’m getting distracted. I don’t want to pull an all-niter on Sunday because I’ve procrastinated this working time away. I don’t want to be distracted by these irrational feelings either.

I’ve been doing so well for so long. I haven’t had an episode like this in almost two years. I know this isn’t my fault and I know this is just a disease with no real cure, but I still wonder how long I’ll be sabotaging my success because of it.

Depression has been my constant companion for longer than I could define it. He is constantly trying to derail my every plan and all my life’s ambitions. I’ve let it absolutely destroy my life once, but did not realize it until I awoke one day curled up in the shadow of a trash dumpster. I had lost my son, my job, and I thought my will to go on as well. My mother helped me then and it was because of her sacrifice that I now wake up in my own apartment with a job I’ve held on to for the last four years and a future I never thought possible.

I can’t let it win.