Is It Depression or Is It A Terrible Mattress?

The other night was a study in mouth-inflamed terror.
No, that isn't one of my wondrous hyperbole. My mouth hurt like the body of a vampire trapped in the Vatican at high noon.
Since I feel like that involves some background: Wisdom Teeth.

Anyway, so I went to WebMD to see if there was something I could do short of DIY oral surgery to relieve the pain.
Right there on the homepage was a test to determine whether or not you had depression.
Why not, I thought, this seems like a fun waste of time. I was expecting a double-blind 600 question personality test that would examine my psyche like Freud's ghost mixed with some sort of futuristic omnipotent God-machine.
Instead I got myself a 10 question, single page waste of thirty seconds.

The first question asked me if I had trouble sleeping. Well yea, of course I do. I am a recent college graduate with no solid job prospects, mounting debt, and a four-year-old habit of staying up til 5 am funneling whiskey down my throat as fast as I can. If worries don't keep me conscious the niggling feeling that I should really be drunk and listening to Modest Mouse right now will.

Also my mattress sucks. It's a bit too hard and I can't get comfortable and its big enough for two pillows, but I inevitably find myself unable to sleep in the cozy center of the bed because then my head is between the two pillows and therefore lacking cushioning.

Question two: Does your back hurt?
Why yes, yes it does, and that must be because all the aforementioned terrors in my life which keep me awake are starting to actually gain physical weight which rests on my shoulders like a gorilla hypnotized to think it's a parrot and that I am Captain Jack Sparrow.

Also my mattress sucks and therefore I spent the night on a lightly pillowed bed of glass, nails, and scorpions with epilepsy. Which makes it impossible to get comfortable and puts a banjo-styled twinge in my neck and spine. Which keeps me from sleeping.

Question three: Are you lethargic during the day?
Yes, I am, because the overwhelming hopelessness of my life and my lack of a future that doesn't involve slinging dope on a cold street corner for pennies while I watch the world around me decay because of my greed stops me from ever finding the energy to try to achieve anything better.

Also my mattress sucks and I can't sleep because it's so uncomfortable and my back hurts because of it so even my moments of waking rest are devoid of any recuperative properties because I might as well just connect myself to an electric fence that causes my muscles to spasm repeatedly so that every moment of my life feels like I just finished climbing a damn mountain.

Question four: Do you not take join in activities you used to love?
Yes, because what is the point of trying to find happiness when inevitably I will die cold and alone buried in a coffin stitched together from cardboard burger boxes from McDonalds, stuck in the ground with a number on my tombstone because I had to be buried by the state for lack of funds and I pawned my identity to a Bulgarian immigrant two years ago so they didn't even know my name.

Also my mattress sucks and I am too tired and in too much discomfort to be bothered to go to a loud bar or try to write because the moment I sit down to try to write a story all I can think is "Some codeine would really be awesome now" and any moments of freedom and solitude I get are spent wondering if maybe I could fit a nap in because I am exhausted because I can't sleep because my mattress sucks!

The only question that seemed tailored solely to those who might be depressed was the one that asked if I often thought about murdering myself, and really if you can answer yes to that one what was the point of asking the others?

Suicidal Sam: God, I want to off myself and every night I fantasize about that one perfect steak knight and the way it gleams in the moonlight. However, I am sleeping great, doing all the things I love with limitless supplies of energy and never experience any back pain even while carrying my backpack filled with condoms and liquor across Europe, so I must not be really depressed, because even though I really cannot wait to feel the freeing kiss of steel against my wrists I own a really great mattress.

I cannot conceive of a person who dreams of the day when they can cut their wrists and shuffle off this painful mortal coil who isn't depressed, or else a fourteen year old boy who just got stood up at the dance.

And if a person who is suicidal really just needs a good night's sleep to keep from being considered 'depressed' maybe every psychologist in the world should be retrained as a sleep number salesman.

Internet Ads Disturbing Tendency To Depreciate Moms

The story of advertising on the Internet is a long and interesting one. (No hyperlink... seems like a good place for one, though.)

First there were pop-ups that just sprang out of nowhere like a voracious jungle cat waiting to shove its materialistic fangs into your soft, warm, consumerist jugular. Then there were those banner adverts that would flash really brightly and claim you were the millionth person to visit the site and you'd just won a WiiPlayBox360 III and all you had to do was sign up for a subscription to Redbook and forward something to ten other people.
Then things for a little more sophisticated and suddenly we had poorly rendered men, women, aliens, and other human figures doing the cha-cha-shuffle because they were so happy that Mortgage Rates Were At There Lowest Since The Birth Of Christ!

Now we have entered a new golden age of idiot-baiting marketing on the net where we see pictures of yellow teeth juxtaposed against pictures of the same teeth photoshopped to be white. Or some fat, bloated, distended stomach juxtaposed against abs carved of marble. Such stunning results!
So once your eyes have been drawn in by these dramatic transformations you look down to read the tagline:
"Discover the teeth whitening tip discovered by a mom!"
A mom, seriously? Wow, good for her!
"D.C. Mom Loses 47 Lbs. a month by following this 1 Old Rule!"
Another mom, huh? That's pretty impressive...wait, 47 pounds? Is that healthy? And if the rule is so old why don't I know about it? Was it lost to time? Is she Indiana Jones' wife?
"Mom's are making unholy amounts of money using Google!"
...ok, I think the Internet just developed an Oedipal complex.

Now, I can see why this whole approach seems to make sense in a very general sense. I mean, honestly, you listened to your mom when she said all kinds of insane shit to you when you were younger (e.g. "Don't make faces, or your face will freeze that way") so why stop now? Leeches for whiter teeth? If you say so, ma.
Also, the word "mom" makes you think of some kindly old woman sitting at home who chances upon a world-altering discovery. The underdog sticking one to The Man. Well you know what, establishment? Guess who The Man is now! (Hint)

But the problem is this - you're using the idea of a mom to insight in the reader the idea that any idiot with a brain the size of a frog's and two opposable thumbs can do what this person did.
She's a mom! Mom's are pretty worthless, right? Sitting around all day doing nothing, no education. Why else would they marry and have kids? Mom's aren't real people. Real people have titles like "doctor" and "king." I mean, hell, if some tramp who pushed out a kid can lose weight and make money and have a smile as white as a Victorian woman's ankles, you should be able to as well, right? I mean, you actually graduated college, right?

I am so offended right now

See what I mean? I'm all for using the "regular joe" approach to marketing, but can we lay off the moms? Why not say that a "recent college grad" or a "person with an MFA" discovered something. Those are the really worthless individuals. Those are the people who truly have no accomplishments to their names.

The thing is, I have a mother who was once a teacher and also worked in a doctor's office. She knows more about medicine than many people I know, so if she invented a cure for the common cold I'd be more "Well I saw that coming" than "Holy hell, seriously?"

I just googled this type of thing and found the following quote: "I'm not a dentist, doctor or medical expert, I'm just a mom."
A mom is not someone whose sole purpose in life is to act as a birther and caretaker. These are women who have done great things and who are probably still doing them. They're not sitting at their home everyday eagerly awaiting the moment their kids and husbands get home so that can prostrate themselves before the feet of their masters. The term "just a mom" should never be uttered.
Sarah Connor was "just a mom," and she averted the Apocalypse, for Christ's Sake.

These ads smack of all kinds of thickness on the parts of their makers. A sense of superiority and sexism. They are base, degrading, and vaguely offensive. So screw you, Internet. I'm gonna start drinking coffee and rubbing coal on my gums just so my yellow teeth will stand as testaments against your mom-bashing ways!

And also, these ads usually come in threes. So I am expected to believe three different moms discovered three different amazing or previously forgotten things, and then all went straight to the Internet? That's just bad planning. Really.

Cinematical Agrees With Me

A recent article on one of my favorite movies blogs would seem to agree with me on my earlier post about movies I don't want to see.

Read it to gain a more credible opinion on the issue (though, as I said, still one that agrees with me).

How I Feel Looking for/Working at a Job

Courtesy of picturesforsadchildren.com

Proof We're All Going To Die A Very Stupid Death

I know this might be beating a dead horse that's already in the third stage of decomp after it's been picked clean by a pack of wild dogs, but goddammit do I get pissed off by the state of the modern publishing industry.
It seems like any novel that's new or interesting or has something important to say immediately gets co-opted by Hollywood and turned into some kind of period piece chick flick that jettisons all pretense of deeper thought in order to "up the sexitude" so that those long strips of celluloid can be transformed through dark alchemy into huge piles of cash.

Heaven forbid you happen to have a simple character drama, or something that has a Sci-Fi or Fantasy theme and yet still adheres to simple practices like plot, spelling, and saying something meaningful outside of "in the future women will totally wear bondage gear and use magick [sic] to entrap men in their web of sexiness." Even if your book does somehow sidestep that fanboy landmine, you'll still end up getting [redacted due to frightening sexual reference] by your publishing company when they put a dragon and two half naked models who took a day off from hocking margarine in order to do the photoshoot for the cover.
"But I don't even have a dragon in this book," you'll say with a note of confusion.
"This'll sell more," they will tell you, tossing you a stack of money which you will nervously put in your pocket as a little piece of your soul shrivels up and falls to the ground, to be consumed later by the publisher when they take their true reptilian form.

I bring this up because last night a friend of mine introduced me to a Web site whose sole purpose it to read and review and talk about romance novels. At least they have to decency to acknowledge in their URL and Web site name that the books are "trashy," and in truth I don't blame them for the jaw-droppingly appalling number of terrible books that get published every year, but this just goes to show a fundamental problem with the world.
Someone with something real and telling to say about the human condition will be told There's No Audience For This while someone who has some girl and some guy who can't have sex until the evil wizard is defeated or something like that will get signed on in a hurry.

You see, when something like Twilight hits the center stage and does an awkward preteen striptease for the world, most people - myself included initially - simply shrug and look away in embarrassment while muttering for it to please stop, you're making a scene.
However, four books, soon to be two movies, and several bleeding eardrums later, it's gotten kind of hard to ignore.
Now, I know what you're going to say, Roan, look, they're young girls and they can use some escapism in their life. When they grow up they will realize the error of their ways and read something better.
Wrong! Wrong for two reasons.
First, let me tackle that "young girls will be idiots" argument. While I readily admit that your youth is a time to do reckless and stupid things, Twilight, unlike, say, a heroin addiction, is something that will severely alienate you from meeting anyone worthwhile. I have met some really cool heroin addicts, junkies who can cook like some kind of Greek deity of culinary wonder and yet also wax philosophical on existentialism and the Dead Sea Scrolls. The only Twilight fans I have ever met are people who can barely be bothered to wonder about whether or not God is, in fact, dead, because omigodedwardissohot. If you have trouble reading that, imagine an entire conversation in which every sentence is pronounced like that is spelled.

Secondly, as this article with a hilarious title points out, they aren't all little girls. Grown women are reading this tripe and eating it up. Women who, for all intents and purposes, are raising other women as we speak, passing this thing down so that soon all we will be able to hear about from any woman from 16 to 89 is omigodedwardissohot.

Ok, wait, just thought of a third argument, what I like to call The Harry Potter Defense.
(Before I begin, let me start off by saying that I have no problem with Harry Potter. It's writing is nothing special, but at least it is not stomach-hemorrhage-inducingly bad, and it's got a good message at its money-pumping heart.)

So this is the argument that says, "Yea, its a terrible book with no real value in the long run, but at least its getting people reading, right?"
Yea. There's a sound argument to take to court with you. "Sure meth will slowly destroy you and lead you to a life of trailer park prostitution, but at least it's got people injecting something, right?"
See, it doesn't matter if the fundamental vessel for transmission is inherently good (books can bestow knowledge, needles can bestow intravenous medicine) if you take the vessel and fill it with detritus.

What's even worse are the people who attempt to defend Twilight by saying that if so many people read it it must be good. Well hell, if so many Nazis thought the Third Reich was awesome, who are we to disagree?
The most grievous of all of these transgressions of logic was when I was talking to a friend of mine about why she liked Twilight.
"It's really well written," she told me over crabs and cold beer (wooo, Maryland!), "and the characters are awesome and it's just a good story." Ok, so far so logical. "I think you would like it," she said, instantly making me wonder if she weren't a pod person sent to kill me. "I mean, I hate books and I like it, so that must mean it's good."

Jesus, I think Aristotle just entered a chess game with God to try and win fifteen minutes back on Earth so he could slap this girl. That's like saying "I hate ballet but this YouTube video of an epileptic spasming on a theater stage is just really awesome!"
Simply because you don't like to take part in a certain form of media doesn't mean that if you actually like something that takes that form it must be awesome. It means you have no leg to stand on and should shut up.
"Books are, like, lame and stuff" has been the bane of my existence since I started reading. And the most galling thing is that people think "He likes books, this is a book, ergo he must like this!"
And the overwhelming popularity of terrible romantic fiction only leads me to believe that at the end of the day there is only a select group of people who are intellectual enough to create and appreciate anything worthwhile.

I pray that when the bombs drop, anyone who ever did more than walk very quickly past the store displays of Twilight and other such trash romance literature for fear of passersby assuming they were interested in it will be given a nice pair of sunglasses and told to enjoy the view while the rest of us huddle in the bunkers and pray that the North Koreans worked out those targeting software problems.