dianaschnuth

I am starting to get seriously annoyed with myself for allowing myself to feel all pissy and depressed for no good reason. I let little things get under my skin. I let things harsh my mellow in a bad way. And I let other people’s negative attitudes affect me more than necessary.

Part of this is definitely, without a doubt, the connection between mind and body. Effed up sleep habits, eating habits, schedules — all are really taking their toll. And these are all fixable things. It’s just a matter of making myself do things just because, instead of ‘because I have to go to work’ or ‘because I have a deadline.’ How about ‘because I’ll feel like shit later if I don’t’?

I also feel like I tend to wallow in my depression / funk when I get in these moods. It’s like I take some perverse pleasure in feeling downtrodden or something. WTF? That went out of style back when I was 17. Righteously oppressed and darkly-mooded teenagers are to be expected; depressed grown-ups get handed a pile of Prozac and told to suck it up. Not that I’m clinically depressed (not diagnosed, anyway), and not like I’d be particularly comfortable with taking medication that alters the chemicals in my brain. The Pill screwed me up bad enough; who would I be after taking anti-depressants?

Point being, I’m kind of seeing myself from the outside in, while still being all funky. I need to fucking shake this thing.

Maybe tomorrow’s wedding reception or next week’s second interview downtown (OMG!) will cheer me up.

Update: Oh, that’s fantastic. Owens got my BG transcripts, sure, but one of the two programming classes I wanted to take in January (co-requisites, so it’s both or neither) is now full. Unless I plan to be unemployed until March, in which case I could take either the MW 10am-11:50am class or the TR noon-1:50pm class.

*insert tantrum here*

I realize that potential employers may Google me to learn more about me and my background. Despite this, I’m going to post what’s on my mind, rather than putting a front forward about how confident I feel about my job search.

I’m pretty proud of myself, sure. I joined one other co-worker to create a relational Access database that currently has over 150,000 records in its main table, with 20 users, and has only completely crashed and burned once in a year and a half of operation. I’ve recently redesigned two websites from the ground up (buzzword: full development lifecycle) using PHP and a custom database backend for content management.

But am I confident about my skills? That’s a deeper question…
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I had two pretty close friends during my last few years as an active Mormon, both of whom have long since fallen off of my radar. One is Michelle, who was a church friend back when I was younger; and one is Ann, who moved to the Medina Ward as a teenager. Both Michelle and Ann were a couple of years older than I, and both were into “progressive alternative” music back in the early ’90s.

When Michelle was 16 and I was 14 or 15, we spent a good amount of time hanging out, doing my makeup, listening to Depeche Mode and The Cure, going to church dances and other functions. She drove me around quite a bit, actually, and I found out later that she had complained to Ann that I never thanked her for the rides. That was one of my first and most striking lessons in gratitude, especially since I had been totally clueless as to why we had suddenly stopped hanging out.

After Michelle stopped hanging out with me quite as much, I hung out with Ann. Ann got her driver’s license a bit later, but still well before I did, and we had a few fun adventures (like driving to libraries hither and yon right before closing just to find a copy of “True Stories” to watch — and going the wrong way down a one-way street in a strange city in the dark). We hung out at her house a lot, and watched “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” and listened to Depeche Mode and The Lightning Seeds, and talked about serious topics like depression, and went to church dances and acted silly and danced like stoned alterna-chicks before it was cool.

Ann and Michelle both went to college out west, in Utah and Idaho, attending Mormon-affiliated schools, and they both married in the mid-’90s. I got to see Ann during the semester I spent at home on Academic Suspension; she’d had a baby by then, and shared with me how understanding and helpful her husband had been during her time on bed rest. As for Michelle, I kept a clipping of her wedding announcement — I still have it in my overstuffed files somewhere.

Ann Gariety and Michelle Dolivier were such a big influence on who I became in later years, and I often wonder what became of them. I’ve done web searches, to no avail; they both married into much more common surnames. Really, though, I’m almost afraid to find out where they are now, because I don’t want to be disappointed. Some of the friends I have kept in touch with have really fallen short of where I thought they’d be by now. For the most part, my close friends over the years have been pretty intelligent people, and I always expected that they’d make something of themselves. It’s disappointing when my friends fall short of who I know they could have been.

I expect that Ann and Michelle are still in the church, still happily married, and probably have a minimum of three children each. Depending on your point of view, that’s pretty successful. From my point of view, though… I don’t know. I don’t measure success like I used to, back when I was a practicing Mormon. If I found out that one or both of them lives in a six-bedroom house in Utah (or Arizona, or Idaho), is Relief Society (LDS women’s auxiliary) president, goes to Homemaking Meeting every Wednesday, drives Billy to soccer practice and Suzie to her flute lessons, and makes time to scrapbook and sew… I’d probably be a little disappointed, honestly. Especially if they’ve jettisoned their CD collections.

Why? I’m not sure. It’s unfair to think that way, since that *is* some people’s idea (and used to be my idea) of a perfect life, of success. Success, for me, is… what? Still keeping my individuality, even as I try to make my way as a contributing member of society. Keeping busy with creative and constructive pursuits. Being financially stable. Having fun. Being happy with my station in life, or at least happy with the struggle to become more. Being unpredictable and unconventional. Being unique. Making people say, “Yep, that sounds like something you’d do…”

I’d like to think that Ann is still a little unconventional sometimes, although she’s always been the motherly, responsible type. I hope she bought the collector’s edition of the Monty Python DVDs, and I hope she’ll show them to her kids when they’re old enough (which should be pretty soon — her oldest would be about 12 by now). I’d like to think that Michelle still has her old cassette copy of Some Great Reward floating around in her basement or attic somewhere, but that she did buy the CD later on, and has kept up with the more recent DM releases. I hope she taught her kids all the cute and weird camp songs she taught me and the rest of the Young Women in church (e.g. “Sam the Lavatory Man” and the “‘Gunk-gunk,’ went Mr. Bullfrog” song). I hope she still plays piano.

I hope they remember me. I hope they don’t mind that I wrote about them.

Ruth Ann Gariety Hansen. Michelle Davida Dolivier… um… I’ll remember your married name eventually. My bad. Maybe you’ll Google yourselves and find my little blog and decide to catch me up on your lives. Here’s an entire website to catch you up on mine. 🙂

Last night, while channel-surfing, I caught part of an interesting film on PBS last night about home funerals. What caught my attention at first was a scene of an open, occupied coffin — obviously homemade — being carried into someone’s living room. The occupant was obviously a real person, and obviously not acting. Neither were the mourners. This struck me as an interesting bit of cinema, considering that many people are uncomfortable with funeral photography, much less funeral cinematography.

A later scene showed a ranch family building Grandpa’s coffin, with Grandpa sitting nearby in his wheelchair. Various brands were burned into the outside of the coffin: children’s initials, Grandpa’s initials and brand. Grandpa even helped brand the coffin, with some assistance. There were actually a few scenes where the viewer got to meet Grandpa and his family, which made his own home funeral even more poignant later on in the film.

Aaron has mentioned details here and there about how he’d like to be remembered at his death. It’s not nearly as uncomfortable a subject as I would have expected; probably because we’re young enough that our own mortality doesn’t quite hit home yet. So, it’s easy to accept his wishes, while still contemplating my own.

Even though I’m comfortable talking about funerary rites with my husband, it’s still a little uncomfortable to contemplate discussing his wishes with everyone. It still seems a little private, a little personal. It shouldn’t, though. Should it?

He’s told me in no uncertain terms that he wants to be cremated, and he doesn’t want his remains to be buried or stored or kept anywhere. He doesn’t like the thought of people mourning over his physical remains; he’d rather people remember him as he was. I’ll do that for him, and I’ll respect his wishes, though I’m not sure I want the same for myself. The genealogist in me can’t quite come to terms with not having some sort of marker, proclaiming the dates I was on this earth.

It’s funny that I can’t let go of that, though, especially considering that I tend to think of cemeteries as U-Stor-Its for dead people. We need somewhere to keep old Aunt Myrtle… so we set aside a plot of real estate, and stick her with all the other dead people. It’s not like the old days, where she’d be buried on the family homestead, in a piece of earth that had actually meant something to her while she was alive. Now, the living just find a quasi-local place with an open spot for the dead. Given that, I think I’d rather be passed down through my family in an urn or something. Use my ashes slowly over time in some sort of secular ceremony. Pass the urn around and share your favorite memories of me. Put me in your tea. Something, anything, but don’t just stick me in storage where no one will remember or care in a few decades.

Cremation wasn’t something I’d even considered until I met Aaron. I’ve always known that I didn’t want people looking at my corpse, though. It’s uncomfortable for me, although it’s traditionally how American funerals are done. I much preferred Memaw’s service: closed-casket, with a photo of Memaw in her mid-40s on an easel by the coffin. People who only knew her in her old age saw the picture and said, “She was so beautiful,” and people who hadn’t seen her in several years didn’t need to see how her lung cancer had physically changed her appearance.

I’m not even sure how I feel about the traditional funeral service. I think I’d much rather have a private family gathering for the somber part, then have more of a wake for everyone else. Make it a party. Remember who I was. Tell funny stories. Pull out the photo albums. Eat. Play some music. But try not to be too depressed. Enjoy and share the memories you’ve got, ’cause there won’t be any new ones.

Maybe I’m too irreverent about the whole thing. I guess that’s just how I’ve become in my adulthood. Take all this with a grain of salt, too; funerals are meant for the living, not the dead, and it’s not like I’ll be around to make my decisions stick.

Back when I was in college, I had a hard time making myself go to class. (Hence that 7-year Bachelors Degree that should have taken four.) Once I got to my Sophomore or Junior year, I started a juvenile but helpful system to reinforce good behavior: I printed out a monthly calendar, with my class schedule listed on each weekday, and stuck a small happy-face sticker on each day where I went to all my scheduled classes. If, by the end of the week, I had happy-face stickers on every day, I would stick a large “Special Sticker” to the calendar as a reward and a reminder that I had succeeded for that week. Sometimes it would be a sticker of my own, but sometimes my roommate Amy would present me with my Special Sticker for the week, if she was duly impressed.

As I recall, I rarely got Special Stickers — maybe once a month, if that. Even so, the sticker system really did help me go to more classes. I’d look at my calendar and remind myself that if I could just make myself sit through [insert pointless 2:30 class here], I’d get my sticker for the day. Seems silly, but it worked. Even when I didn’t get a Special Sticker for the week, I could see the classes I’d ticked off on each day and say, well, I was only one class away from a Special Sticker this week!

Well, with me trying to focus on only a few things at a time these days, I decided that I would revisit the calendar-sticker strategy. I have a calendar by my desk with a list of daily to-do items: work on my portfolio, follow up with job apps, do one daily chore, wash dishes, walk for 45 minutes, and aikido once a week. I’ve pruned back a little, since I wasn’t able to do everything I wanted to do in an evening — now I’ll either work on my portfolio or follow up on a job app, for instance, but not both. Yet, I hadn’t gotten a daily sticker after over a week of trying my new-old system of reinforcement.

Last night, I looked at my daily list, and realized that I just had to do a daily chore and I’d get a sticker. So, pretty late at night, by the time I should have been having my Quiet Time and getting ready for bed, I cleared the remainder of the crap out of the suitcase that’s been sitting by my bed for two months, put it away, and counted my chore complete. Yay, sticker!!

Sure, it seems small and silly and childish… but, if it works, I’m all for it. It shouldn’t have been such an impetus ten years ago, either, but it was. It’s all part of taking joy in the small things, I suppose.

After I finish my new portfolio and secure a new job, I can shift to a new focus: writing, or genealogy, or whatever strikes my fancy in another month or so. Then I’ll set myself another reachable goal, lay out daily mini-goals like I have now, rinse and repeat. Eventually, I shouldn’t need my sticker system to keep me focused on-task. That’s the hope, anyway.