She's taking on something, alright.

Someone I care a lot about recently made the decision to go into rehab.  And when he told me about it, for a split second I was jealous.  Jealous.  Wow.  What?

I was jealous because he has a defined problem - an addiction.  It has a name, and it has a general path to recovery.  It's not an easy path by any means, but it's a path.  A way out.

I have struggled with depression since I was a teenager.  It was in my blood - my grandmother (whom I adored) was severely bipolar, and two of her sisters had to do ECT (for the uninitiated, that's electroconvulsive therapy).  I'm sure there are other people in my family that have struggled, but my parents are notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to anything personal.  These are the people who failed to tell my brother that my dad was in the ICU following an operation (which they also didn't tell him about) and who didn't tell my sister about the death of our great-grandmother for two months because they didn't want it to upset her.  Which is fine except that 1) my sister was in college at the time and 2) my sister didn't particularly care for our great-grandmother.  Not to the extent that she would have celebrated the woman's exit from the world, but she certainly wouldn't have been driven to distraction by her grief.  This is the woman who, during her final visit with us, was so senile that the only one of us she remembered was my brother, and that was only because went with my dad to pick her up and drive her back to Arkansas from West Virginia.  She thought my sister was my brother's girlfriend and she thought I was the maid.  It was a fun visit.

My depression is one of the reasons that I go months without posting anything.  Little things, things that shouldn't even matter, pile up on top of me until I feel paralyzed.  I remember when I was in college, I would spend hours watching movies in my dorm room, because I literally was too bogged down with what I should be doing.  If I was studying, I felt like I should be practicing my clarinet (I was a music major).  If I was practicing, I felt like I should be working out.  If I was working out, I felt like I should be cleaning my room.  If I was cleaning my room, I felt like I should be at work.  If I was at work, I felt like I should be studying.  And so on and so on, until the guilt spiral pulled me under and I just sat in my room, doing nothing. Staring mindlessly at the television, not even really aware of what I was watching, just needing something to drown out the voices screaming in my head that I was a failure, that I was letting everyone down, that I wasn't good enough or smart enough or whatever enough to deserve to be happy.

The worse part about depression is that there isn't a clear path out.  Not even a general guideline.  There's no demon rum or demon drug - it's just your own broken brain.  And the cure can be worse than the disease in terms of side effects and long-term exposure and all that jazz.  It's an invisible enemy who already knows your playbook.

I guess that's part of the reason I was envious of my friend in rehab.  Being in rehab is a socially acceptable thing.  You can tell people you went to rehab, and they are generally sympathetic.  And if you bow out of a cocktail party because you're a recovering alcoholic or decline pain medication at the dentist because of a pill problem, it's totally understandable.  But if you bow out of the party because you hate everything and everyone on that particular evening, or if you decline the meds because you're afraid that in a weak moment you'll down the entire bottle, people look at you like you're crazy.  And God forbid you ever seek any kind of inpatient treatment.  People find out you've spent time in a psychiatric facility and they lock their doors and stop giving you knives at cookouts.

I've been profoundly unhappy lately, and I'm trying to get to the bottom of it.  I want to make some changes in my life, and I know how hard it's going to be.  I've always worked better with a solid goal in mind, so my psychiatrist suggested I set some goals for myself.  Which brings me to the reason for this post.  I want to document my progress (or lack thereof).  I want to have some kind of record of the successes and failures, because as with anything, if you identify the source of the problem you can fix it.  Maybe I have triggers in my life that I don't even realize.  Maybe this will help me find them.

I like symmetry in my life, so I've settled on six.  Six goals in six weeks.  Not necessarily one per week.  Some will take more effort than others.

The six goals that I have chosen are:
1.  Finish five previously-started craft projects.  I have dozens of half-finished projects scattered around the house.  I need to pick five - any five - and finish them completely.
2.  Kick my sugar addiction.
3.  Invest in myself.  This one's a little more complicated to explain, but I'll post more later on it.
4.  Post in this blog at least three days a week.  I know I won't post every day.  Especially on days when I work.  I'm so exhausted by the time I get home that I barely have time to kiss the baby before I fall asleep.  But three days is totally doable.
5.  Meet five new people.  I'm one of those incredibly awkward extroverted introverts.  I'm totally cool with being the center of attention for five minutes, but I'll need three days alone with my kid and my thoughts to recover.  I'm also painfully awkward in social situations.  But I need to step outside my comfort zone.
6.  Learn a new skill.  Take a class in something.  Preferably something that involves physical activity.

So yeah, some of those are going to be easier than others.  The sugar one is going to be a killer.  But I'm determined to make it work.  We'll see how it goes.

Nancy Drew and the Vanishing Signs

I am, by definition, a Southerner.  I was born and raised in Louisiana, came of age in Arkansas.  I have the accent and everything.  I love sweet tea and ceiling fans and festivals named after whatever random critter/crop/nickname you can think of.  But I recently relocated far away from my home, and as such have been abusing the hospitality of some of my very good friends.

Now, I have always been of the opinion that having houseguests is a lot like having a large parasite attached to your skull:

With two major differences: you can get rid of a parasite with medications, and houseguests usually smell better.  (Although as I can unfortunately tell you from experience, this is not always the case.)

I've been trying to keep to myself as to stay out of the hair of these generous people who have so graciously agreed to let me invade their lives for a while.  In fact, some days I think I hide away too well.  These are the days I get text messages like this:

Host Friend has been so great to me, but I think I baffle him.  He gets very agitated when I tell him that I don't have plans for my days off.  Granted, I imagine his brain looks a little something like this:

So naturally, my lack of planning is something he doesn't seem to understand.  I'm beginning to think that I may give him an ulcer or something by the time I leave by virtue of my seeming refusal to plan anything more than a few hours in advance.

The other thing I'm dealing with for the first time in my life is traffic.  Now, where I come from, a traffic jam is caused by a cow in the middle of the road or a large piece of agricultural equipment is being moved up the highway at top speed (4 MPH).  Our highways are at most three lanes going each way, and most aren't even that big.  Speed limits range from 40-70 MPH and are strictly enforced.  Well, maybe that's a slight exaggeration.  Sure, you'll get pulled over for speeding, but generally once the cop reads your ID and realizes that he knows a) you or b) your mama, he'll generally let you off with a warning.

There are more people in this strange new city than are in the entire state of Arkansas.  Which means that when I commute into the city, I'm driving mile for mile with more people than live in my entire town back home.  And while the posted speed limit is like 55, the traffic is moving at 80, and even going that speed, I routinely get passed by state troopers.

The other thing I've noticed is that down south you see this:

And it is repeated about nine times before any lane of traffic ends.  Whereas up here, the lane just mysteriously vanishes with little to no warning.  Maybe it's the whole Southern hospitality thing, but I really don't think it would kill anyone to put up a sign or something, instead of leaving it unmarked and watching the cars veer and swerve suddenly when the lane ends abruptly.  Or maybe it's a vast conspiracy by whoever it is that gets paid to clean up the mess when someone wrecks on the highway.

Once more unto the breach

I got to visit my favorite alley again today.

See, for my profession, there are two base credentialing exams: the CRT and the RRT.  I took the CRT back in January, but in order for me to actually graduate in May, I had to take my RRT exam today.  Well, today and yesterday, to be specific.  I was lazy and didn't feel like cramming the entire thing into one day.

Anyway, this time I had someone drop me off so I didn't have to venture passed the vagrants at the bus station, which was nice.  Instead, I got dropped off by an elementary school playground that looks ridiculously out of place in the area.  This section of town isn't horrible, but it's not the nicest.  In fact, there's a large-scale urban renewal project going on all over the city.  Which will make it lovely in about ten years, but for now it's still a mess of broken concrete and abandoned buildings.  And this shiny, brand-new elementary school playground filled with shiny, brand-new playground paraphernalia, all of which was being completely ignored by the schoolchildren in favor of huddling by the fence trying to shield their iPods and cell phones from the monitors.

Anyway, after wandering passed the children, I found myself facing the alley once again.

I took pictures this time, because I felt like some of y'all didn't quite believe me last time.   Here's some of the poorly-executed graffiti:

And the door, which has since been marked, to an extent:

I can't really say much about the tests themselves - other than I think our professors were intentionally giving us practice tests that were harder than the real thing.  I mean, they scared the bejeesus out of us when we were preparing for them, and they wasn't nearly as bad as I thought they were going to be. And all that matters is:

Erin the Great, RRT.  I kinda like the sound of that.

Brought to you by the letters C, R, and T

So I have a couple of new letters to add after my name.

I took my CRT exam today, which is the entry-level certification for respiratory therapists.  I was supposed to have done this several weeks ago, but the snow happened, and I had to reschedule.  I was afraid I was going to be the last person in my class to take the stupid thing, but I was actually testing today with two of my classmates.  Not that it made any difference, because we were expressly forbidden from speaking to each other.

Anyway, I got a little apprehensive about the whole ordeal when reviewing my confirmation email this morning.  Not because of the test - I mean, it's a big deal and everything, but we've been taking practice CRT exams at the end of each semester since I started school, and I passed them all - but because of the instructions on how to locate the testing center.

The first thing that stuck out to me was the instruction to park in a parking deck across from the bus station.  Now, I'm not sure about the rest of the world, but there are a lot of very sketchy people that hang out at this bus station.  It's a very lovely building, but it's kinda hard to see the beauty of it when there are vagrants vomiting in the bushes around the clock.  Also, it has been heavily graffitied.  However, the graffiti-ists were not the most creative of people.  So the entire building is covered in rather non-descript messages in black spray paint.  As I have never tagged anything myself, I don't know if this is actually the current style of graffiti.  I suspect we just have really bad graffitiers.

(I really wish I had a picture to show of this, but I sure as hell wasn't going to hang around long enough to take one.  My apologies.)

Anyway, the directions went on to instruct me to walk up several blocks and look for a building with a green awning.  Not a problem.  Green awning.  Got it.  Then, they instructed me to walk passed the door of the building and down an alley.

An alley.

I didn't really know what to make of that.  I mean, I try to avoid alleys at all costs.  Mostly because I tend to be a tiny bit on the nervous side, and I've watched entirely too many cop dramas on television over the years to ever consider hanging out in one for any reason.  But I reasoned that the testing center people surely wouldn't send me down an alley for no reason.

The next step was to look for an unmarked door behind a Dumpster.

At this point, I started to suspect that the testing center was actually a speakeasy in the 1920's.  An unmarked door.  Behind a Dumpster.  Seriously.

The door was, of course, locked.  So I knocked.  And waited.  Alone.  In an alley.  Behind a Dumpster.  I really expected someone to jump out of it and knock me in the head and steal my purse or something.  So I waited for someone to let me in.  In reality,  I probably waited about 30 seconds.  But they were the longest seconds OF MY LIFE.

Once inside the testing facility, I got to go about proving I am who I say I am.  I used my passport, because in most cases, a passport counts as two forms of identification.  But not here.  I'm lucky I had my driver's license on me, because I was not about to walk back through the scary alley and passed the bus station to get it.

I then had to remove all of my jewelry and prove that my eyeglasses were eyeglasses and not some kind of crazy cheating device.  I couldn't even bring my own pencil into the testing room.  We were provided with a golf pencil and one piece of lime green scratch paper.  All of my other belongings were placed inside a canvas bag, which was then locked and attached to the back of my chair.  I had to argue with the woman for ten minutes to get her to let me keep my inhaler out.  She really didn't want to let me, but when I pointed out that in the event of an unexpected problem I could be dead by the time she unlocked my bag, she relented.  But I had to sit it on the table behind me.  In case I had crib notes written on the canister or something.

I can't really say much about the test itself, because apparently the first rule of CRT testing is you do not talk about CRT testing.  But 86 minutes later, I walked out of that place with my scores in my hands, and I didn't even notice the alley or the bus station.  Because it was over.  And I passed.