Not with a whimper

I have a fantasy of curating a film festival at some crucial part in our history – the turn of the new millenium would have been ideal but I'm not sure I can wait for the next one – featuring only movies that are about the end of the world. Like planetary annihilation end of the world, ones where the military doesn't save the day by blowing something up. It seems odd to me that there are so many of these movies. We are as a society justifiably worried about our world-ending behaviour, but other than “The Road”, I can't think of another recent movie that deals with slow environmental planetary death of our own making. We prefer to outsource our doom to meteors and invasions from outer space. At any rate, here are four movies that I would definitely put on the schedule. In this order, lightest to gloomest, so that you are guaranteed to leave the theatre either considering throwing yourself under a bus or else thanking your lucky stars that this is all fiction.

This Is The End

On the surface, this is definitely not my kind of movie, and I don't know why I picked it out from the library shelf. It stars a whole bunch of actors whose popularity has mystified me for years, but whose movies I'll be more open-minded about in the future. It has Seth Rogan and Jonah Hill and guys like that who always seem to travel in a pack. They are all playing characters with the same names and resumes as their own, though they are probably exaggerating their personality traits. I probably missed some of the humour because I don't know them as well as their fans do, but I still found the movie very funny.

Seth Rogan and Jay Baruchel are best friends who go to a party at James Franco's new house against Jay 's wishes. The house is filled with pretentious celebrities, all playing versions of themselves. Michael Cera seems to be acting out someone else's dark side, because I doubt that he even fantasizes about being Michael Cera the absolute pig and self-centred ass-hole, doing lines of coke off of starlets' buttocks to the amusement of the other guests. After a giant pit opens out in front of the house, most of the party guests die in the immediate aftermath including Michael Cera's epic death. Left is a core group of guys who try to figure out what is going on and how to survive, as LA burns in the distance. Is it the apocalypse or just a really big earthquake? There are probably a lot of in-jokes that I didn't get, and a lot of it is crude and juvenile, but enough of the humour got through to my 52 year old self that I laughed a lot. All the way to the end of the world....

It's A Disaster

A group of friend meet for their monthly”couples” brunch, one of them bringing her new boyfriend to be introduced to her oldest and dearest. It's clear that this particular group is starting to outgrow one another as some of the relationships are beginning to fray a bit at the edges. Most of the men would rather be watching the game (there's always a game on, isn't there?) than visiting with one another, and some of the couples seem to be experiencing a bit of tension. Just as it starts to seem that the title of the movie is referring to this awkward social get-together, something happens “out there”. TVs and internet connections aren't working, so the group can't really get a clear handle on what's happening, but eventually a neighbour in a haz-mat suit appears at the door. They learn that “dirty bombs” have been dropped all over the U.S. including one that is very close to them.

The scenario is played for both comedy and drama, which really mix quite well here. All the characters are simultaneously trying to cope with their imminent death while still caught up in all the personal dramas that they are involved in. There is a funny scene in which the couple who is perennially late for all the brunches shows up outside the barricaded house and tries to convince their friends, who clearly think they had this coming, to unseal the door and let them in. They really should learn to arrive on time.  The final scene of the movie when all of the characters realize that death is inevitable, is about as humorous as you could possibly imagine it to be under the circumstances. We now pause for an intermission and popcorn break.

A Timely Post (ho-ho-ho oh no)

Often when people write about depression, they rely heavily on metaphor to describe the phenomena.  This, I've found, isn't entirely satisfying because you don't alwaysshare the writer's feelings about whatever they are comparing to.  For example, Winston Churchill talked about the "black dog" of depression that stalked him through life.  Personally, I like dogs of all colours and they cheer me up quite a bit.  I'd be inclined to turn around and scratch behind its ears, myself.  I liken depression more like sinking in quicksand. You can either let it happen or struggle against it, but you will still end up paralyzed and suffocated.  But who knows, there may be people out there who find quicksand comforting and womb-like.  Like a warm bath, it is...  So, putting metaphor aside, I will write about some of the thought patterns that I experience.  This is by no means a comprehensive list!

"I've made a mess of everything" - I get like this when, while depressed, I fail to do something that I meant to.  It starts with beating myself up over the one thing, but often turns into a laundry list of all the similar times I've not done something, followed up by a damaging conclusion about my character.  A recent example: it was a nice day and I "should have" taken my cat Jasper out for a stroll as we hadn't been for a while.  I just didn't feel up to it, so I didn't do it.  I started thinking about all the other times when I hadn't taken him out, and then what a sad and disappointing life he's had because of me and how, in conclusion, I am a selfish, lazy person who should never own a pet and should have let another person buy Jasper because he would have been so much happier if he'd been allowed to roam free.  Jasper, meantime, was siting next to me purring....

"I just can't" - This caused me to miss a LOT of school when I was younger.  Everything kind of lumps together into a gigantic ordeal and can't be seen as a series of small things that actually might be manageable.  Mind you, high school is a bit of an ordeal, isn't it?  A more mundane example.  A few years back when I was depressed, I had run out of food at home.  Every day for maybe three or four days, I would think about ordering pizza. Then I'd picture myself picking up a phone, dialling, telling someone what I want, changing out of my pajamas to answer the door, walking downstairs to get the pizza etc. It was too much in aggregate, if that's the right word, so I would scrounge through the freezer and get some stale bread to make toast, which was just about at the limit of my energy.

"Even if it does get better..." - I know, as anyone does who's ever thought about it, that no emotional state is permanent. The nature of feelings is that they are constantly in flux. So when someone says, as my wonderful doctor used to, that no matter how bad I feel, I know that it won't last forever.  A depressed person will counter, either verbally or mentally, that after the depression abates, whatever more positive state of mind follows will also not last, and that the depression is bound to come back.  Over and over again. Which, when a person is in pain, is not easy to contemplate.  My belief is that this thought pattern leads to suicide more than any other. It can also lead to apathy during therapy and maybe non-compliance with appointment schedules.  And there really isn't any good way to combat it because for most people who have had clinical depression, it is a fact. Unfortunately, it's a fact that gets a lot of airplay when you're depressed.  A few weeks ago, I had a dream where my dream self was in a bad way and was visualizing an endless series of grey days ahead of her without any respite.  I woke up in the middle of the night, and thought, "oh, come on! Isn't it bad enough that I have to think this way all day?  Can't I at least get a break when I sleep?"  Then I feel back asleep and had an absurd Bollywood-like dream in which I didn't even appear.  Thank god for answered prayers!  (Or, as many non-native English speakers say, "Thanks god!" which I find delightfully direct.)

One more.  "This has nothing to do with you" - which is really hard for people around the depressed person to deal with. Depression is a very internal experience.  As opposed to manic states, or schizoid ones, the person with it is not in denial at all, but really can't see how it's anyone else's concern and why do they need to explain themselves to anyone.  I think this is a self-preservation technique, because a depressed person is overwhelmed with how they themselves are feeling, and can't even begin to think about other people. Often suicides will say / write things like "everyone will be better off without me", which is an extension of the same thing, along with the "I've messed everything up" thought.  It's all mix-and-match for us depressive types and you never know what's coming up next.

Let's face it, it's all hard. I probably know some people who have never experienced any sort of emotional trouble in their lives, but in all likelihood, they didn't register on my radar as someone interesting whom I would like to know better. My massage therapist, also lovely and wonderful, would talk about the emotional body as a container, which expands to contain as much feeling as you will let it. When you allow yourself to experience large emotions without reservation, you are increasing your ability to know all emotions more fully. We damaged people, through and not in spite of our flaws, can become something quite wonderful, eventually. As Leonard Cohen says: There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.

My oyster

You know how really successful people sometimes say that they put their pants on one leg at a time? The other morning, I was getting dressed using this technique. The only problem was that I put the first leg into the wrong pantleg! You may correctly surmise that I am not a really successful person from this true anecdote. Hey, if I could make stuff up, I'd be an unsuccessful novelist, instead of an unsuccessful blogger whose entire readership can be linked to me through genetic fingerprinting.

People have called me an under-achiever. “You're too smart to be doing that kind of work.” “Why don't you go back to school?” On bad days, I will join this chorus. Why do I a job that I share with some laughably and scarily unimpressive people, whose antics and failings I could put down here, but I would be opening myself up to lawsuits? Trust me, the stories I could tell... So why do I find myself in their company? Am I just lazy?

If I'm going to be absolutely honest, I do have to own up to being less than an energy powerhouse. Once I was even fired from a restaurant I worked at, not for slacking off, but for saying to someone who asked that I would never want to be the manager because it was too much work and I was too lazy. Restauranteurs are among the last supporters of the suppression of workers' rights. Which is one reason I eventually did go back to school to take a course in Child and Youth work. It has solved the problem of unethical employers for the most part. My main motivation, though, was that I wanted to do something of more significance than just preparing that meal that you didn't feel like cooking. I envisioned myself working in the mean streets, in some gritty urban environment, rescuing teens who were battling for their lives against addiction and exploitation. But here I am, many years later, finding my true joy in working with primary school students. Struggles they have in plenty, but a lot of it involves forming their letters and stringing them into words and sentences. So have I succeeded in my career?

I really liked school when I was young. I like the learning part of it anyways, and found it very easy, but I was often overwhelmed by the social situations. I was very shy when I was younger, and I didn't get a lot of positive reinforcement from my teachers. I didn't get a lot of anything, actually. A couple of times people have told me that such and such teacher thought that I was one student in a million or some kind of hyperbolic comment, but they never said it to me. Far less did any teacher I ever had make me feel liked and accepted. They never made me feel special or gifted or like anything at all. If they tried to, they weren't using any language that I was listening to. School was just another place to be unseen by the adults in my life.

The playwright Eve Ensler said “When we give the world what we want most, we save ourselves.” That's what I want to do. EI try to give every child that I work with at least a little part of me, looking right at them, and showing them that I like what I see. I will who catch Zeinab's eye when passing her in the hallway and am rewarded by the appearance of a dimple. I'll look at non-reader Toby's puzzle drawings and hears the stories of the characters he sees in them (“This guy can breathe underwater, but he didn't know he could..this guy is the father and he's sending his son to his room because he failed a test..”). I get it when Hend with a background of family trauma asks me to read Scaredy Squirrel with her for the third time in as many days (“If all else fails, play dead..”) I love it that Amelia's friendship club has rules like “Once you're in Friendship Club, you can never leave Friendship Club” (it's okay because F.C. takes Fridays off) and I spent a whole period once drawing and colouring bamboo shoots for her Panda Folder (that was during her early Panda phase).

I don't know if my students are going to remember me specifically when they get older. I don't really care. When I am with them, I show them that I see them. They are miraculous in their individuality and complexity and I try to make sure that they know it. That's not such a bad way to make a living, is it?