Nathan Lane’s eyebrows

You may be familiar with the actor Nathan Lane from The Birdcage or The Producers, or from his recent guest spots on Modern Family. He voiced Timon the meerkat in the Lion King franchise.

He’s in possession of an incredible pair of eyebrows.

The right and center photos reflect fairly common eyebrow positions - “normal” and “raised”. But the photo on the left features the Nathan Lane trademark eyebrow expression. The left eyebrow arches up and forward, while the right one dips inwards, giving a plaintive effect that would melt the coldest heart. (Melting hearts would be an awesome supervillain power, incidentally.)

If I had eyebrows like Mr. Lane’s, I might go for days without speaking, communicating only through eyebrow expressions.

What’s the difference between lying and make believe?

I say a lot of things that aren’t true. For example, I wouldn’t really prefer drinking laundry detergent to Diet Pepsi. But recently, a friend of mine introduced me as “Jez, the source of all lies,” and that got me thinking. Where is the line between a joke and a lie?

Why are you even thinking about this?

Once upon a time, when I were just a lad, I was in the next door neighbor’ s back garden. They had a climbing frame which they were giving us, and I was there for a test drive. As I climbed up on it, the neighbor lady (who was a child psychologist) was chatting to me about something or other. On my way down, she waited until I was on the bottom rung of the ladder, and then asked me the question in the title of the post. I lost myself in thought so rapidly that I fell off the frame and broke my arm, which then took my mind off lying fairly rapidly.

Nowadays there are three kinds of falsehoods I enjoy sharing, but I never considered lies. I’ve been including common-or-garden sarcasm into my repertoire for a while now, and it always makes me feel a bit smug that I saw the opportunity. I also enjoy exaggeration for comic effect, which I think I probably learned from the television.

More recently, I’ve been trying out statements that have no relation to the truth, like claiming that some bottles had spiders living in them, or that I taught Ron Paul to read. I don’t know if there’s a name for this kind of humor, but it’s a way for me to entertain myself using the power of make believe.

Is it really lying?

As I see it, a lie has to have two properties:

1. It is false.
2. The intent is for the listener to believe that it’s true – usually in order to give some advantage to the liar.

Sarcasm is clearly marked as falsehood by tone of voice and its absurdity, so I don’t think it meets the second criterion. Similarly for the exaggeration – no-one really believes that Midori has so many shoes we needed to build an extension to the house for more than a second.

But the absurd statements? I’m not expecting to convince anyone, but I am amused by the thought that someone might believe that I’m from Tennessee, or that I was a mail-order groom, or that I first met my friends by selling them illicit substances. Those few seconds of watching facial expressions as they parse the sentence and think “could he be… no, that’s not possible” make me giggle on the inside. So I suppose those really are lies. Sort of.

What do you think? What is it that pushes an untruth into the realm of lies? Am I missing something? Did a philosopher that I’ve heard of but never read have a theory about this?

Treatment

Now that I’ve broken the seal, the depression words are spilling out.

There’s, like, a stigma?

Even amongst people who acknowledge that depression is A Real Thing (as opposed to something you need to just get over), there’s an uneasiness around treating it with medication. People who have never been depressed believe that the first line of treatment should be enhanced diet and exercise, then changes to routine and sleep schedule, then self-help books, then talking therapy, then voodoo, then antidepressants.

Now, I’m not saying that lifestyle changes don’t help. But they didn’t get me close to functional – and I had professionals keeping me on track for 6 months. Without support, and without fairly immediate results, it’s not really feasible for someone who’s severely depressed to take on these kinds of changes. When you’re barely coping with life as it is, how do you fit in 5 hours a week of cardio?

Part of the problem is a misconception that antidepressants are “happy pills” which replace all genuine emotion with unspecified elation, and so taking them really just avoids the problem. This couldn’t be more wrong. If people want to feel good regardless of what’s happening in their lives, they have options – we go to doctors to feel normal again. Antidepressants don’t replace real feelings – they enable them in a person who would otherwise just see grey.

There’s also concerns about the effectiveness of some antidepressants (most notably the SSRIs, which have never worked for me but do for some other people) as well as generic fears of Big Pharma. No fears of Big Diet and Big Exercise, I would note.

Me and my meds

It wasn’t easy to find meds that work for me. I am currently on a cocktail of 3 different drugs (an antidepressant, a stimulant, and an anticonvulsant, for some reason) which get me out of bed in the morning and let me taste food. It took YEARS to find this combination, and it’s changed my life.

For a long time, each new treatment I tried worked for a while and then stopped. For medication, the pattern usually went something like this:

• One month to build up to a therapeutic dose.
• Two months of things working out pretty well.
• One month where it starts dropping off. I understand that people have good times and bad times, and put it down to bad times, and give things a chance to clear up on their own.
• One month where I stop being able to function. I miss work, can’t socialize, and otherwise exhibit full-on depression.
• One month to taper off the drug; and the cycle starts with the next one.

Throughout this I’d have ups and downs at work and in my personal life, making commitments when things were going well that I’d break when they weren’t.

The current regime has been working for about 9 months now. Let’s hope there isn’t a next one.

Here comes the downer...

This blog is called Brain Heal for two reasons.

The first is a reference to the nickname of a healing spell in World of Warcraft that doesn’t require a lot of thought to use. I was planning on posting a lot about WoW, so having a reference to it would be relevant.

Every picture of "depression" on the internet is of a
person in this pose.

The second is a reference to my own mental health, which is not always good. I was also planning to post about my experiences, my challenges, and the treatments that have worked for me. I put it off for a long time – in part because it’s kind of a downer for me to think about, as well as for anyone to read. I’d much rather be sarcastic about people on the internet – that lets me feel like I’m better than them.

But then I saw this video, and read the accompanying post. It’s focused on people in the skeptic/atheist communities, but the call for people who have struggled with mental illness to speak out and let others know that they aren’t alone is universal. It's the only way we can change the culture that believes that the only cure for depression is to "just get over it."

I'm still going to post more about what I've been through, but I want to get this out there while I'm stalling:

I have suffered from depression off and on for much of my childhood, and my entire adult life. I am on a drug regime that is keeping me functional. And it's time for me to start talking about it.

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Third life crisis

I am 28 years old.

I own a house and a car. I pay bills for electricity, water and sewer, sewer capacity charge*, cable internet and television, voice over IP phone, mobile phone, rubbish collection, mortgage, property tax, and homeowner’s association dues. They are all automated except for the water bill and the capacity charge. If I forget to pay the water bill, the city will cut off my water. I don’t know what they will do if I forget to pay the capacity charge.
I have been in the workforce for longer than I was at university. I have been a Subject Matter Expert in three technical areas. I have presented on one of those subjects to an audience of 200. I have trained my colleagues in my areas of expertise.
I have been in the same relationship for 2/3 of the time since I became sexually active, and married for half of that time. In the past 6 years, the longest we have spent without seeing each other is 2 days. I cannot imagine how I would live without her.

I am 28 years old.

Most of the “books” I read are comics about wizards. Many of the non-comic books feature people who believe they have been abducted by aliens, or pan-dimensional spiders.
Today I spent 4 hours virtually positioning guns to shoot aliens, preventing them from stealing my stuff. After the first 3 hours, I discovered a sneaky trick which made it a whole lot harder for the aliens to steal my stuff. This made me feel inordinately pleased with myself.
I spend an obscene amount of time watching television. I wish I could tell myself that it’s some form of high art, but 90% of what I watch is crud. I wish I could tell myself that it’s a social tool, giving me something to talk with my friends about, but I watch far more TV than any of my friends. I wish I could tell myself that it fulfills a critical role in my relaxation process, but I don’t have a relaxation process.

I am 28 years old.

When Seth MacFarlane was my age, Family Guy had been cancelled and renewed. Twice. When Freddie Mercury was my age, he wrote Killer Queen. When Johnny Depp was my age, he had played Edward Scissorhands. When Morgan Freeman was my age, he was an extra. When Jim Morrison was my age, he had been dead for a year.
I don’t have a clue what I want to be doing in 5 years’ time. I’m iffy on what I want to be doing in one year’s time. Not being entirely sure on where the apostrophes were supposed to go in that sentence made me feel uneasy.
I thought of myself as being 15-and-a-bit for years. Then I was 22-and-a-bit. I don’t think I can be 22-and-a-bit any longer. Midori says I’m 40-minus-a-bit.

I am 28 years old. I am an adult. And I have no idea what that means.


*My house is in a new development, so the city had to lay a new sewer pipe. To cover their costs, they charge a fee to residents for the first 10 years.

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Awkward and creepy

I have had phases of my life when I’ve been incredibly shy and socially awkward, and then phases when I’ve overcompensated and been loud and obnoxious. The past few years, I thought I’d kind of found a sensible middle ground, where I can talk to people without either worrying about how they’ll perceive tiny body language cues that I’m not even aware of, or making them the audience to The Fantastic Dolbia Show. And then there are days like today.

I have been going to my current hairdresser for a little over a year, I think. She does cuts and colours and we banter and it’s always been great. I had an appointment today to have my hair done, and it’s little overdue, so I’ve been feeling scruffy. For those of you who have not had their hair dyed by a professional, typically they colour it and then cut it, rather than the other way round. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, because it means they’re dyeing hair that’s just going to be cut off and thrown away, but there must be reasons.

Today my hairdresser, who I shall call Mandy in order to preserve her identity, started by putting in the dye and foils on the left side of my head, and then spun me round so that I faced away from the mirror while she did the right side. When she turned me back towards it, I saw the ridiculous image of myself in a black smock with a head full of foil. I looked like a volcano that spewed out silver instead of magma. And I said – and this where it all started to go wrong – “I look so pretty today!” Mandy misheard me and said “Thank you! Some people have said!”

Now, Mandy was looking cute today, which she always does. She’s curvy and has a couple of facial piercings, and a bright smile. I never say anything, because I’m terrified of sounding really creepy: “You look so pretty today. I want to touch your face.” It would be extra awful if I did something that grossed Mandy out and then she felt she had no choice but to cut my hair for another 45 minutes when she’d really rather be scrubbing her hands. So I never tell her that she looks nice because I don’t want her to see me as “that customer who’s always perving on me” and dread our appointments. So when she thought that I had told her that she looked pretty, I started damage control and said “No sorry, I said that I look so pretty today.”

And this is worse, because now I’ve taken back what sounded like a compliment. Shit. And she was OK with the compliment in the first place so if I’d just let it go, it wouldn’t have mattered! But now I’ve implied that she’s not pretty, which is worse than telling her she is. Aaargh! And at this point, I look a bit lower down in the mirror, and I realize that under the smock, I’m tenting my hands in my lap. Which means that there’s a suspicious looking bulge coming from my crotch.

And after I’ve collapsed my hands, too much time has passed for me to really say anything without making it worse. Besides which, there’s lots of people around so if I dug myself in even deeper, it would just escalate and escalate. So through the rest of the appointment, I’m contemplating apologizing and ultimately I decide that the moment’s passed and it wasn’t a big deal. Mandy’s still very chatty so I don’t think she’s actually upset.

But now 9 hours later, I’m still thinking about it and whether there’s any way to recover now. I could track Mandy down on facebook and send her an apology, but I’m worried that that would only reinforce the creepiness. I could bring a card to my next appointment saying I was sorry, but that’s in 6 weeks and she’ll probably have forgotten by then, so bringing it up again would be weird.

But then, is blogging about it any less creepy?

Tell them why not, then walk away

Over the last week, I had two encounters with high-pressure salesmen on big transactions. I managed to get out of both of them with my finances intact, but I felt icky afterwards.

I wasn’t expecting a sleazy dealer at the proper Toyota dealership. I’d just come from the Honda place where the salesman let me test drive 3 cars, told me about the features, and accepted it when I told him I’d be back in September. The Toyota salesman, on the other hand, put on the pressure from moment one. He told me that the cars I wanted weren’t being made any more, due to the tragedy in Japan earlier this year. This was true. But then he immediately steered me towards used cars before giving me a chance to catch my breath. I tried a Yaris and a Matrix, and I really did not like the Matrix. So he whisked me back to the showroom, and rounded up my “I preferred the Yaris” to “I would like to purchase the Yaris.” And at this point it was on my list of possibilities – but before buying, I wanted to try at least 5 more cars, talk to Midori, and to my credit union.

He assured me that his dealership had the highest customer satisfaction for certified used cars of any Toyota dealership in the US, glossed over the minor accident the car had had, and brought in his financing guy to show me the numbers. It was super cheap – assuming that the accident really only had done cosmetic damage, which had since been repaired. And even then, I was thinking about the car as a maybe. But there was no way I was going to buy it that day. When the finance guy asked me whether an even lower price would get me into the car that day, I told him no – the issue wasn’t the price, it was that I hadn’t made up my mind on the car yet. They told me it would be gone soon, and I said that if it was gone, I’d find another car. I gave them fake contact details and walked away.

The second one was a mortgage broker from Quicken Loans. My first inkling of sleaziness was when I realized that they weren’t affiliated with the Quicken accounting software. (Wikipedia tells me that they used to be, once upon a time.) I spoke to a broker online about a month ago, and she offered me a deal which would lower our payments slightly, but not significantly. I wasn’t going to do anything more, but various representatives from Quicken kept leaving me voicemails saying that they had new information. So, I thought I’d call up to see if I could get a better deal. And after a full day of giving the new salesman my information, him calling back, working numbers, blah blah blah, he finally made me an offer. And it was a good deal. It would have saved us a good chunk of money every month, with low up-front costs. I just needed to check with Midori, and get some competitive quotes. And I told him this, and that he could call me tomorrow after I’d had a chance to do that.

And this wasn’t good enough for Captain Quicken, who proceeded to tell me that this was the best deal I was ever going to get anywhere, so I didn’t need to shop around. And if I agreed it was a good deal, and Midori had the same priorities as I did, why would I need to ask her? Why not just assume yes and send him a $500 good faith deposit cheque today? When I explained that that’s not how my marriage works (she wouldn’t like the news that I’d borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars without mentioning it to her beforehand) he moved into bad-cop mode – if I didn’t agree today, the interest rates could go up, and he’d need to pull my credit again. So I told him directly that I had been considering the loan, but thanks to the pressure he put on me I didn’t want to deal with him anymore. So I was going to hang up and I didn’t want to hear from Quicken again.

And I haven’t.

I’m not the only person who finds this sales approach really unpleasant, but salesfolk will keep using it as long as they don’t see any negative effects – as they see it, if they make a sale it’s evidence that it worked, and if they don’t then there was nothing that would have worked. Since their pay is so heavily commission-based, they’re going to try whatever they think will have the best chance of success. So if we want to make it stop, we have to give them negative consequences, and let them know exactly what those are.

Sales patter works under a pretense that they don’t get anything from the sale – you want to buy the item, and they’re just helpful people trying to get you the best deal. You know it’s not true, and they know you know, but the pretense serves a purpose for them – it makes it more awkward for you to call them out. They just want to HELP you; what could they possibly gain from you buying something you don’t want? So if we don’t want something, most of us either make an excuse and run, or sometimes give in and buy it, if it’s something you kind of wanted anyway and it’s not TOO expensive.

But this just encourages them to keep pushing and make life less pleasant for the rest of us. To change their behavior, we have to change how we react to it. Here’s what I’m going to do from now on, and I would encourage other people to do the same:

1. When I am given the hard sell, I will not buy the item from that business even if it’s something I wanted. (Unless it’s something that I NEED, and can’t obtain or afford elsewhere.) I will inform the salesdrone that I was interested in the product but his/her sales tactics have put me off and I will now be leaving the premises.
2. When a salesperson is genuinely respectful, informative and helpful, I will thank them, and commend them to their manager.

It’s only going to work if lots of people do it, though. I call it the Campaign Against High Pressure Sales, which I would like to abbreviate to CHAPS, but Midori informs me actually spells CAHPS, which isn’t even a word. So, please share. We could make the world slightly more pleasant.

It's Thursday, Thursday

I'm repurposing this blog, slightly. This far it has been all about games, with an emphasis on World of Warcraft. This no longer really works for me:
1) I stopped playing games in January 2011. I just lost interest and needed a break. Without playing, writing about them didn't make a lot of sense. Over the past month I've started again, but...
2) I'm not planning on going back to WoW in the foreseeable future. It just wasn't working for me anymore, for various reasons, and if a game isn't fun you shouldn't play it. That's one of the rules of sanity.
3) I want to write about other stuff, too. I can't count the number of times I've read a book or seen a film and thought "The Internet needs to know my thoughts on this."

As such, I'm opening the blog up to be about whatever the hell I want it to be. I'm keeping the name and URL, because when you have 3 followers you don't want to lose them by moving around the whole time.

Next post will be about Magicka. Because Magicka is awesome. See, not that much change.