The Brilliance of Resilience

I have been an inpatient in a mental health facility three times in my life. All times I was put there at my own request. These hospitalizations have cost money and they've ultimately cost credibility and respect. When you tell someone that you've been hospitalized or if they find out on their own, two things happen. First, they tell you how brave you are for dealing with your issues head-on and creating a better life for yourself. Second, they shift uncomfortably in place and immediately register you in the "loose cannon," category in their head that is usually reserved for street wanderers and senile elderly relatives. You become and brave liability. You could snap out at any given moment. People that have never spent time in a mental health facility have somehow become the experts of how it works, too. Armchair Psychiatrists will spout the latest thing that they've heard or read - and they'll pander to the idea that mental health disorders are a sig...

The snow has been relentless in the last few weeks and I have spent more time in one place that I have for years. I finally unpacked my bulky vintage cosmetics case that I lived out of for two years and at first it was a momentous occasion that seemed to signify that I was laying roots, but the more I find myself in residential West Virginia without a destination for an afternoon of gallivanting or burning calories in the sun, the more I realize that I must face the realities of my own geography and its imprint on my way of thinking. And how there are many binds here. The idea that I received a DNA test as a gift (as many people have) is interesting to me because it turned into more than just a fun way to find out if the rumors that you are Native American are true (my rumors are not substantiated, by the way. Got Dang Mitochondrial DNA!). Ancestry found that I had a first cousin that I did not know in their database. It didn't seem completely out of the ordinary that the bastard...

I got my parents out of the house on budget-priced Tuesday to see the newest adaptation of, "Murder on the Orient Express." My mother loves Johnny Depp. My father doesn't like to be left behind. I love Hercule Poirot. How I felt about the film is kind of irrelevant to what I was thinking about after it was over. There's a scene in the very beginning (and I really wish that I could find the exact quote) where Branagh's Poirot talks about how maddening it is to instantly see every detail about every situation and know what is right and what is wrong. It is a foreshadow to his eventual walk from the train and from a group of broken people complicit in a murder. Although David Suchet's portrayal of Poirot's moral choice in the Masterpiece Theater version is, in my opinion, so much more devastating - I understand Branagh's rewrite of a more blatant emotional ending for (to be honest) less emotionally sophisticated audience. Poirot's moral conviction...

When I was a pre-teen I watched the 1954 Marlon Brando film, "Desiree," and didn't realize that I did. That happened to me often while watching a Saturday afternoon film. I didn't realize I was watching, "The Godfather," for the first time until I was at least an hour into it and wondered why I couldn't keep my eyes off of the screen.  I was hardly interested in the weirdly overly-hyped but unrealized love affair of Napoleon Bonaparte and Desiree (what a little turd, amirite?), but was taken totally with Michael Rennie's portrayal of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (known historically as Charles XIV John of Sweden). This film isn't great (the costumes are wonderful to see when you're living on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, though), but I found myself thinking of this character days after the film ended. I think I felt that there was this sense of injustice regarding the lack of acknowledgement of the nature of this character and the...

I went to a meeting a few weeks back where I met a myriad of people that I had only previously worked with via phone. And when they would see me, there was this brief pause at my face, my appearance...until finally one of the said, "You look so young to know so many things." WORD . I get accused of serial youth at least once a week - with estimates pegging me often a decade younger than I am - the teenage girl painting my nails, the co-mixees at the stuffy mixers, the men I flag down in parking lots to take photos of their vintage cars...just whomever, I guess. It has made me fascinated by the idea and perception of youth. I usually give a flippant response about looking young because I do not have children but that cannot be it. Women of all ages have children, right? I want to grill these givers of compliments and understand their motives and reasoning. I want to look a gift horse in the mouth. But then, are they compliments? Or, do I give the air of naivety or immaturi...

When I was a teenager my friends were in love with: Aaron Lewis from Staind, Fred Durst, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, a slew of WWE (nee WWF) wrestlers and professional athletes (there's always that one friend, right?) and members of various boy bands. Among others of his ilk, I was in love with Gregg Allman. Yeah, I have no idea either. I really didn't adopt jam band culture in totality (I was never really into Grateful Dead, for example), but there was something about Gregg Allman that I liked that I can't identify. God rest his blonde ponytail. I never buy rock n' roll records, but I might now that I have my own space to jam into. Brothers and Sisters , anyone?  One of my favorites of The Allman Brothers Band was on their 1994 album Where It All Begins (total disclosure: Dickey Betts wrote it, not Gregg Allman), surprisingly enough. As a kid listening to records from the seventies for the first time, I had no concept of what the singles were, so I just list...

I kind of decided to move out on a whim. That's not wholly true. I had been thinking about it since I moved in, but I actually put all of the pieces in place and did it earlier this month really quickly...and oh man. I'm deep in the proverbial throes of the change cycle - the part where it is so uneasy that it's hard to know to the right decision even exists...let alone if I've made it or not. I wrote this last week when this was true: This is the second full week of living there full-time. I came home last night and made dinner and realized that I had an Iraqi bootleg copy of the entire series of The Golden Girls on DVD. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean that the show is dubbed in Arabic (how flipping amazing would that be, I've lamented) but that the recording quality isn't great. So, this is the third full week that I have lived alone. And after working my way through the entire series of, "Two Fat Ladies," I am still deep-diving into my...