Bread from Heaven

Well, life goes on, not comfortably, but still forward. I spent the weekend at a June Faire, an SCA event, which would have gone better if I’d had company. Unfortunately, my introversion makes it difficult to interact with people, so I spent most of the time reading and finished Towers of Midnight–a book of more than 800 pages–and added a few hundred words to my own writing, which had been at a block. Next event, I plan on trying to make myself a bit more inviting for company. Hopefully I won’t burn as badly in the sun, either…

I recently discovered a radio station which plays a variety of music, some I like, some by which I’m a lot less enthused, but in particular one song that has quickly grown on me. It went from a song to which I liked listening to a song that made my eyes wet, and then I saw the video for it. After I finished crying, I knew I had to post it.

Macklemore and Ryan Lewis featuring Mary Lambert – Same Love

May 27th, 2012 was the Rapture

Another year has passed without the Apocalypse taking place — it’s somewhat disappointing that people keep making predictions, having them not come true, then making more. Most people think of Harold Camping when I say this and his predictions in 2011, but not as many know about his three predictions in 1994 and fourth in 1995.

Robert Weinland predicted the Rapture to occur on September 29th, 2011, citing himself as one of the Witnesses prophesied in Revelation. To the surprise of few people, nothing appeared to happen on that date. He later went on to prophesy that it would happen on May 27th, 2012, then May 29th, 2013. Shortly before the last date, he recanted his prophecy and claimed that it would yet happen, but only after the Earth had undergone tribulation.

I do not consider Robert Weinland to be a good prophet. He is vainglorious and a tax evader. However, he was right about one thing: the Rapture occurred on May 27th, 2012. It just wasn’t as he had envisioned it.

I dream about the end of the world very often. I suppose I have a morbid subconscious, since I don’t dwell on it in any capacity that I’m aware of, but it shows up in my dreams at least once a week. I’ve seen intense fire, meteors from above and the ruins of civilization. There are days I’ve thought about keeping a yume nikki (sorry) of my apocalyptic dreams, but I’m afraid it would turn into a science fiction movie. Therefore, it wasn’t entirely surprising that I dreamed about the apocalypse on May 27th. It was what happened later in the dream that was unusual — it was something that had never happened before, and hasn’t happened since.

The dream began in media res with memories of the events leading up to the point of the dream in which I entered, which is typical. I tend to think of my dreams as experiencing a slice of some alternate reality, as they’re often intricately detailed and self-contained little worlds. In this one, the Earth’s crust was in the process of collapsing into the sea, which had crept inward beneath the surface, infiltrating underground reservoirs and weakening the foundations beneath homes and cities. In this world, my family and I were living further inland on a stretch of grass plains, but the destruction had reached our home and I could see the ground sinking even from the front porch. As it reached the house, the floorboards cracked and everything jerked.

This is usually the point at which I would wake up. I’m not a heavy sleeper to begin with and vertigo usually snaps me out of any dream, but that didn’t happen this time.

What happened was that the crumbling earth went away. In its place was pristine soil, black and healthy, rich with nutrients. Instinctively, I knew that any plant could grow in it, just as I knew that the air, which smelled sweet and fresh, would never again contain any chemical which would make someone ill. I went back inside the house, which was now restored and completely clean, to explain what I already knew to my family: we had just seen the Rapture. We were now in Paradise. They doubted me, at first, but in the kitchen was a member of the family now departed, waiting for us to explain where we were and what had happened.

This wasn’t Heaven, at least as commonly depicted. I call it Paradise because it was still Earth, but it was a perfect Earth. Information was flooding into my mind from people all around the globe; telepathy was now only natural, since we had no secrets from each other and no need to keep them. Fear, hunger and greed were superfluous and no longer existed in this world. Whatever we wanted, we could obtain freely, so aesthetics had become our calling. It mimicked Earth in that the arrangement of cities was similar, but now that money had no value, people were free to live as they pleased.

Although we still had physical bodies, these were no longer bound by the same rules. By willing it, I took flight to explore the new world, soaring through the sky at speeds that our fastest jets would be unable to match. Almost instantly, I could travel from western United States to Europe to look upon the oldest cities, now rendered as quaint villages according to the needs and desires of their inhabitants. The air remained pleasant no matter where I went, and even the icy reaches of the far north were easily tolerable. I could soar above the clouds while conversing with people on any side of the planet and we could now share ideas and experiences as if we were all one and the same family.

I came upon something then which I couldn’t understand. It was a boundary made to look like endless skies, yet somehow fuzzy, like a poorly compressed JPEG image. My boundless comprehension gave me no intuition to explain this barrier, so I tried to overcome it. I set my weight against it and pushed until I could feel something giving way before me–

And woke up.

Pope Francis and his opposition

As many of you will have probably already heard, Pope Francis came out recently with a message about faith and good deeds that turned some people upside-down in a scramble to creatively re-interpret it to mean what they thought it should mean.

What Pope Francis said was definitive. He was adamant about it.

The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone,” the pope told worshipers at morning Mass on Wednesday. “‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!

He didn’t say everyone has the opportunity to be saved if only they pursue a very specific teaching of Christianity. He said we are all saved, full stop.

It continues to amaze me that so many people, from fundamentalists to atheists, insist that it must be otherwise. To begin with, this view isn’t even supported by the Bible. The very lines cherry-picked to exclude non-Christians are part of a larger context which states the opposite. If you will forgive a little armchair theology, I would like to give my interpretation of these verses.

Romans 3:22[a]: This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.

This is an example of how tweaking the translation changes the meaning altogether to one which is convenient to the person using the text as a clobber verse. The original translation was “through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ to all who believe.” Suddenly the meaning of the text changes completely from “if you believe, you are righteous” to “you are righteous because of him, if you believe this story.”

Moreover, those who quote this often prefer to skip over Romans 3:22[b]-24, which states that all people are justified by the sacrifice. This is repeatedly upheld by Romans 5; verse 1, 9, 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 and 21. That’s pretty definitive as well.

But it all ties in with–

Romans 3:28: For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.

This is usually interpreted as a variant of “by faith, not works,” indicating that works alone are insufficient. Yet Romans 3 goes on immediately to say that God justifies everyone through the same faith, both Jews and Gentiles. How can this be, if Jews and Gentiles have different faiths? It then concludes, Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith? Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law. Upholding the law is a tenet of the faith, therefore upholding the law is upholding faith.

This is a recurring theme throughout the New Testament. Those who believe, do. Those who do, believe. The two are tied together, as we’ll see in–

John 14:6: Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

This one actually makes me angry. It’s such a dishonest reading of the text. It’s one sentence in a passage that says much more. John 14:5-14 is the whole of it.

Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”

Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”

Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves. Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.

The verse which, so carefully plucked from the whole, suddenly conveys a completely different message when laid back into its proper context. Suddenly it has nothing to do with faith in Jesus and everything to do with faith in his teachings. “How do we know the way to God?” Thomas asks, and Jesus replies, “I’m going to God, so just do what I do.” John 14:23-24 reinforces the message: Jesus replied, “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Anyone who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me. Matthew 25′s description of the day of judgment drives the message in even harder.

Doing good deeds isn’t enough, no. My interpretation, reinforced by reading the Bible several times over, however, is that the faith in Christ has nothing to do with having faith in Christ as a deity and everything to do with faith in the meaning of his teachings. Christ taught sacrifice over and over. He taught that the greatest act of grace is to give up something of your own for a person with less, whether it’s money, possessions, time and attention or simply love.

Moreover, as Slacktivist members and Fred Clark himself have said over and over, if we are truly in the image of God and God is without our limitations, then God cannot have less love, mercy, justice or compassion than the least of us. If my love, mercy, justice and compassion are greater than God’s, then that cannot be a God worth worshiping — and I do not believe such an entity could exist and still be God.

I refuse to believe a sociopath can care more about people than God, and I love you all enough to make great sacrifices for you. Why should God be any different?

Reduced activity

Yes, it figures that as rarely as I post as it is, my activity would then be reduced even further. I have a good reason though. Life has decided I didn’t have nearly enough lemons handy, so it gave me a one-two punch from which I’ll be some time in recovering.

First, it has become abundantly clear that depression isn’t my biggest problem. Discussing some of my recent physical issues with people has revealed more and more about them that wasn’t being considered. The long and short of it is that I’m a likely candidate for PTSD. The telling point was that the fire that occurred while I was on vacation caused the exact same response that I’ve had in several high-stress incidents of the past few years.

Then, just days later, my significant other and I called off our four year relationship. This doesn’t come happily, as you might imagine, but it’s not the knock-out punch it could have been had it ended on harsher circumstances. I acknowledge my faults, and the circumstances which led to this. I’m not bitter. Not happy, but not angry or inconsolable. The biggest problem is that now I also have a dire lack of financial and living space security.

As of the moment, my priority is finding income of any sort. PTSD, ironically, provides me with a possible option: Medicaid. It’s not the income I would have preferred, but at this point, I’ll take whatever I can get while I search for better options.

That “Aha!” moment, but without the exclamation

If you read my previous post, you know that I’ve struggled with depression.

If you haven’t read my previous post, why are you here? Go on, go do that first. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Finished? Great.

It finally occurred to me today why I might feel this way. It’s because of money. The love of money might be the root of all evil, but the existence of money seems to be the bane of my existence altogether. As Fred Clark recently said in three different fashions,

1) Money can’t buy happiness, but it does buy protection from certain forms of unhappiness.
2) Money is not sufficient for happiness. Money is necessary to avoid certain forms of unhappiness.
3) No, money cannot buy happiness. But it is necessary for buying necessities without which happiness is nearly impossible. Having enough money is no guarantee of happiness. Not having enough money is a guarantee of unhappiness.

That’s where I am. I have no money, therefore I am guaranteed unhappiness, in broad defiance of a tarot reading once taken which predicted my future would be “poor, but happy.” The fortune teller has since recanted the certainty of this reading.

It isn’t specifically the lack of money which makes this difficult. What seems to make it such a soul-blighting state of being is the inability to obtain money. As a number of people have written a lot about how being poor is a self-sustaining cycle.

You’re poor, so you buy a cheap vehicle.
The vehicle is cheap, so it breaks down.
You’re poor, so you can’t afford to replace it or get it refurbished.
It’s fixed on a budget, so it breaks down again.
You pay so much money keeping it barely running that you remain poor.
You’re poor, so you buy a cheap vehicle to replace it.
The vehicle is cheap…

On only two occasions of my life have I ever had an income. The first was working in the marketing department of a video game company — I sought out retailers to carry our products. It was a small company, so it paid me a mere $100 a month. This position was eventually terminated without notice, and by that I mean I continued to work for two weeks before anyone informed me that I had been laid off.

On the other occasion, I worked for a transcription company, transcribing audio recordings of business meetings held for a variety of clients. This was almost interesting, since every day, I had a new client and these were often major corporations — I was a fly on the wall at meetings held by everything from real estate companies to medical schools. The only problem was that their dialogue then had to be written up verbatim, which is a lot less easy than it sounds when not everyone at these meetings would speak clearly. I have a lot of difficulty making out dialogue, so it sometimes took several tries to decipher what someone was saying if they had a heavy accent.

The hours were also intolerable. I woke up at 6:00 AM to get my file for the day. The file would then be delivered between noon and 2:00 PM. Being on dial-up, the files took awhile to download. The average file would be an hour long, which would take (depending on the speakers) several hours to transcribe. I often didn’t finish until 10:00 PM and sometimes later, and this entailed taking no breaks, eating breakfast, lunch and dinner in my office, working steadily. For the best chances of getting through the file without mishap, I would spend at least a couple of hours surfing any relevant websites by the company to familiarize myself with some of their terminology. Again, many of these speakers would have heavy accents and a phrase like “NASDAQ index” doesn’t come intuitively to someone who’s never been in corporate to begin with.

On top of that, the pay was shockingly terrible. I was paid a fraction of a penny per word, so over the course of an hour’s worth of dialogue, I would accumulate around $25. This is where my “90 hours weekly for a $125 paycheck” figure comes from that some readers may have heard — I could and often did work steadily from 6 AM to midnight for $25 a day. As you can imagine, there were no benefits to this job other than having it, and I eventually no longer had it at all. In the end, the job was outsourced to the Philippines. I can only shudder to imagine how little they were getting paid, before the company was then sued for corporate espionage.

Beyond those two jobs, I’ve never had a major income, and not for lack of trying. I apply to places, but never hear anything back. If I call or visit to inquire, I get noncommittal noises. I’ve probably applied to at least a few hundred businesses of all kinds, but the most conclusive response I ever received was actually seeing someone discard my application in the garbage beneath their desk.

This sort of thing can contribute toward poor self-esteem, as can repeated implications that one’s worth is determined by their income and their ability to maintain an income. This has led me into a hellish double standard: my value is determined by my income, my ability to get an income is entirely in the hands of potential employers, and yet I’m held personally responsible for my income status.

I need an income, but I can’t get an income, but I need an income, but I can’t get an income, but I’m a terrible person if I don’t have an income, but I can’t get an income because I’m a terrible person…

And so it goes in a downward spiral which threatens to leave me not only emotionally wrecked, but indebted for thousands of dollars for the student loans that have yet to make a positive impact on my employment status.

I need to get this bloody book written.

Depression

Today, a regular on Slacktivist, chris the cynic, posted to call attention to yet another blog I had never seen before: Hyperbole and a Half. The most recent post describes the author’s battle with depression. The author uses a comedic approach to explaining how bad depression can be, which trips up my artificial empathy patterns with the mixed message “feeling terrible is hilarious and I want you to know how hilarious it really isn’t,” but it’s a feeling I understand.

I almost feel as if I shouldn’t, but I do. I took every psychology class and anything related my college offered — Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Psychology of Sex and Gender, Developmental Psychology, Sociology, Social Problems, Bioethics… they all gave various insights on the human mind and its myriad conditions. But!

I still have antisocial personality disorder.

That’s kind of a problem. How does one properly understand how others feel when they’re afflicted by something which, by definition, makes it very hard to relate to anyone else? I won’t deny it, my natural impulse on reading “I have depression” is to think “… So, you’re like, uh, sad?” Words are inadequate to describe my own emotions; now I’ve got someone trying to tell me theirs, and I have no natural mechanisms to care. That makes me sound heartless. I am. I’m Commander Data, tilting quizzically while trying to determine which comfort subroutine is appropriate to your native species and culture. Should I pat you on the back or give an inspirational speech? (Neither. You’re a Talarian and I should join you in mournful howling. Awoooo.)

I do understand. I understand depression on an intellectual level from my schooling, but it took realizing that I suffer from the same condition to put the equation together and see how it related to other people. I’ve struggled on and off with depression over a number of years, wandering somewhere between dysthymia and major depressive disorder. At its best, it’s a feeling that never quite goes away, but it’s just comfortable enough to fade into the background. My usual emotional state is relaxed and easy-going, but who says that has to be a happy easy-going?

At its worst, it feels like having been crushed. Sometimes I swear that’s the literal truth, that if I had an x-ray done, I would see my ribs crushing into vital organs. It doesn’t help that I already have physical problems with my everything, which just adds insult to injury: not only do I feel terrible, I feel terrible. My mind and body are colluding in a grand design to make themselves miserable! Jerks.

It’s difficult to explain depression to someone who hasn’t ever had a major episode. I say it’s like being crushed. In a way, it’s almost more like those nights when no matter how you toss or turn, you can’t find a comfortable position. Your legs just don’t fit right, your arms can’t figure out if they want to hug something or punch the wall, and exactly how straight should the spine be? Have you ever had a night like that, and after awhile, you just give up and hope that you fall asleep before cramping and bruising set in? That’s like living with depression: it hurts, but there’s nothing you can do about it except wait and hope the day passes before it gets worse. After awhile, it’s just kind of there. It hurts. The sky is blue. It hurts. Kids are noisy. It hurts. It’s never warm enough, except when it’s too hot.

It hurts.

I discovered awhile ago that a lack of natural empathy not only makes it harder to care about others, it translates well into not caring about one’s self. Hyperbole and a Half’s author described this as “my depression got so horrible that it actually broke through to the other side and became a sort of fear-proof exoskeleton.” The emptiness and futility are so encompassing, they include any concern for what people might think of me. Thankfully, expressions of that total lack of self-regard have largely been limited to throwing on something society frowns upon people wearing (you name it, I’ve probably worn it, from tied straitjackets to clothing very obviously intended for someone not of my apparent sex to bondage collars to things which probably ought not to be mentioned without a NSFW tag) and wandering around public places.

It doesn’t bring me any great joy to do so, but the desire was there — along with a complete lack of concern for what could happen. Someone could see? Oh well. Someone could yell? Oh well. Someone could yell very loudly? I might muster up the willpower to yell right back. They might call the police? Darn, I might go to jail and have a place to stay and food and better medical care. Scratch that: I’d have medical care.

I feel like this sums up a lot of how I spend my days now, just tottering around while I wait for the day to end, alternating between doing responsible things and trying not to feel too flattened, rebelling against responsibility by throwing on a miniskirt or a dumb hat or (NSFW!) and grabbing a book and going outside. Or staying inside. I’m actually very bad with responsibility, a fact of which has apparently somehow been communicated to the eight places I sent job applications to on Monday.

I think I’ve run out of things to write. Can you tell this was an exercise to try and wriggle out from under my depression?

And we’re back!

Ah, Michigan, I almost forgot why I left it. What a conga line of punishment for my error!

It began snowing just as I arrived, requiring a drive home in blizzard conditions. The temperature hit 70 degrees two days later. That same day, the house caught fire. No one was hurt, but the outside of one wall was completely destroyed.

I failed to observe a single day without overhearing at least fifty racial slurs. It was a climate of severe political unrest. Numerous people casually discussed civil war, war against the government or assassinating President Obama.

The chronic shortage of bullets in stores has been laid directly at the feet of the government as a mass conspiracy to keep people from stockpiling ammunition in preparation for the coming battle.

My sleeping patterns have been badly messed up.

Safe to say I’m not doing that again in the near future.