I received two closely related questions via email this week, and I’d like to share my answers. I’ve rewritten these, so they’re not word-for-word the responses I sent.
The first person asked me a general question about how to deal with depression. So I wrote back something like the following:
I am a depression sufferer. I really don’t know how mine scales up next to anyone else’s. My one suicide attempt was half-assed (you can read about it in my book Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate). Although I’m not as suicidal as I used to be, even now I go through troughs of depression and inevitably start thinking of doing myself in. This seems to be a deeply ingrained mental response to depression.
Q. I don’t know if were are over or not but I’m dating this boy who lives in a town 3 hours from mine. We’ve been together now for one year but it’s long distance relationship. Yesterday a girl sent me this message on Facebook asking who I was and what kind of relationship I had with my boyfriend. I told her all that, and she answered saying that they’ve been together for 3 years and that he is also her boyfriend!! He denies it all, but I know he’s lying. I love him, but I guess I’m better off just forgeting him and trying not to have a long distance thing ever again, because you never know what the other person is doing. I want to forgive and forget but I don’t know what to do anymore. Can you advise me?
In the previous installment of our futuristic fiction series, Please Use Rear Exit, Mikhail, recalled exactly why he’d just broken up with his GF Katya for the second – and final – time. Now ready to move forward in life, and on the #720 Brown BTWN bus route around which his life is centered, he ventures out with the boys for a night on #720’s main terminal tiles – which is dangerous territory given that it’s a smoking space Mikhail used to visit with Katya…
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Please Use Rear Exit: Chapter 5 – Avoiding Katya
The boys walked silently through the bar’s heavy plaster doors and Mikhail braced himself for his first encounter with the #720’s main terminal in several months. Turning the corner past Low was always Mikhail’s cue to turn his charms up. The party was around that corner. Each step had the potential for conversation. The light was harsher there. Bars and clubs, big and small, would clamor for his attention from both sides of the corridor. In their flat-screen-sized windows, blinding neon signs advertised anything a man could want, unless he wanted to see inside the club; that part of the screen was tinted. Along the path a slew of freestanding and rotating advertisements, mis-planned garden plots, fake plastic trees, and other such “city betterments” would stand in his way or distract him from whatever goal was at hand at that moment. And the ceiling would loom over everything. It was all familiar to Mikhail, but it was still something that he had to mentally prepare himself for.
As the New Year begins, a lot of people are looking for ways to cut their spending. If you’re one of these people, you might want to start by scrapping your cable bill. Having any kind of network programming bill (cable, satellite, etc.) is becoming unnecessary. Even in those awesome ‘bundle’ packs you are paying significantly more than you have to, since most of the content included by the cable and satellite companies is now being offered by internet streaming services.
