WillSpirit!

(Click image to go to the 'Vintage Calculator Museum')

Although no posts came out of it, I have actually been working quite a bit on WillSpirit. In the first step, I found software that would allow me to run Internet Explorer on my Mac. I had tried this before with a product or two that did not work, but at a local ‘Mac’ store I came across a sale copy of ‘Crossover’. I am now able to run IE6 and IE7. Crossover won’t run IE8, however. Despite that, I was able to move on to figuring out what the problems were when I saw my blog behaving so shabbily at the library. Just being able to use IE7 and IE6 puts enough in hand for me to feel comfortable putting the old WillSpirit theme back up. It appears the problem was limited to IE6. For instance, the pernicious gray box around the ‘roots’ photo only shows up there, not in IE7, or Firefox, or Safari. Also, the ‘disclaimer’ did not work in IE6, but did in everything else. (Actually, the footer is way too long with Opera, but so few people use opera on home computers I’m not going to worry about it.) Something got fixed between IE6 and IE7 so that it complies with the standards better. I’m assuming Microsoft would not have gone backwards and made IE8 noncompliant, so I put the old theme back in place. (If you are using IE8 and see problems, however, you would win my eternal thanks if you told me about them.) I am also grateful to anon, who pointed out that many of the glitches I saw at the library may have just been one-time loading errors. I believe that to be the case now, since they have never reappeared. Sadly, I was forced to set things up so that IE6 users no longer get to see the awe-inspiring ‘roots’ graphic, and might have to suffer with a small but always-visible disclaimer (that will probably be temporary). In case these awful losses prompt some people to upgrade their browsers, I am providing the link to the free download for Internet Explorer 7 and/or 8. That’s the technical update.

As for a personal update. My mood has lifted. I had a session with a therapist (and to tell you the truth, I’ve just about given up on therapy), that really made a difference. The experience could have been out of a movie: deep seated wounds, fears and anxieties that I’ve repressed since childhood came roaring to the surface. I wept with a mixture of sorrow about the past, and relief that I can finally let it go. The therapist validated the trauma I suffered and guided me through the pain. I actually feel freer today. It’s only taken about a thousand (literally, a thousand) therapy appointments over thirty years to finally have a session that made a decisive difference. There are a number of reasons why this happened, one being that coming off Cymbalta has released my emotions. Silly things, like cheesy inspirational emails, right now have the power to spur a rivulet of tears. I don’t want this to be my emotional condition for the rest of my life, so that my eyes well up at the slightest suggestion of something sad. But it is nice being able to let down my guard and experience some deep emotions. For years my feelings have been limited to little more than an oppressive fist of depression on my chest. I am tired of watching the angry teeth of cynicism bite the flesh off my experience, in service of guarding my most sensitive wounds. Yes, without flesh there is less pain, but there is also neither movement, nor passion, nor embrace.

Adding to the good feelings brought on by that ‘breakthrough’, I came home to find my email box holding messages from members of Lon Gallagher’s family. Lon was my very good friend during the years after my hospitalization in 2000, until his death a little over a year ago. I posted a tribute to Lon in July, and his daughter came across it. She and some others of Lon’s family wrote nice comments and/or emails to me. It feels good to know they saw my little piece, and so understand how much Lon meant to me, and also what I observed as he deteriorated toward the end of his life. Best of all, it seems to have brought them some comfort, too.

The internet continues to astound me with its power to help people communicate despite the distances that separate us, and the fact that we are lost in an ocean of six billion people. Just to give a sense of how many human animals the planet holds, if you said one person’s name every second, it would take 190 years to say the name of every individual on Earth. The internet helps people with similar interests and concerns find one another in this unfathomable crowd.

Such a thing was unimaginable when I saw my first hand-held calculator in 1971 (or so). It cost almost $400 (US) at a time when you could by a VW bug for $2000. All it did was add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Not long after, I hitchiked over a long distance in the middle part of the US. I got a ride from a man in an unremarkable light blue sedan, covered with dust on the outside, and reeking of tobacco inside. We talked for hours as we rolled through miles and miles of late season cornfields, the stalks froming green walls on either side of the road. The terrain had no hills, and the road had few curves. As we travelled through this monotonous landscape, I told him my grandmother’s story. She had been born in a time of horse-drawn carriages and kerosene lamps. By her ninth decade, she lived in a world of color televisions, jumbo jets, interstate highways, and telephones she could use to call relatives across hundreds of miles of separation. The complexity of all this ‘stuff’ almost overwhelmed her, but she knew she had lived through a landmark epoch of human history: the rise of the technological age. As this man and I zipped along at seventy miles per hour, I related what my grandmother believed: that my own life would not see anything like that much technological progress. I tended to believe her.

My companion disagreed. He told me that before I died, computers would have spread to involve every aspect of human life. Even simple household appliances would be run by computer. Everyone would have a computer at home, and it would be more used more often than the television. Medical technology would be unrecognizable in its advances. He had many predictions along these lines.

I did not disbelieve him, exactly, but it sounded pretty far-fetched. Then, in the early eighties, I watched as magnetic resonance imaging scanners were first deployed in clinical use. Still in medical school, I happened to be at the University of California, San Francisco, which had a lot to do with the technology’s development. The pictures of the brain those machines provided (the brain having always been my major interest), seemed literally miraculous. Without surgery, or (ionizing) radiation, you could see nerves exiting the brainstem that aren’t much thicker than spaghetti strands. This is old news, now, but at the time the advance thrilled anyone involved in the field. Perhaps that marked the time I realized that the anonymous guy who drove me across Indiana had quite likely given me a true picture of the future.

Looking back, it is obvious that he articulated a clear and accurate vision of the world we now inhabit. I don’t know if those ideas were in common parlance among computer specialists in the seventies, or if he was a visionary. Maybe a little of both. I wish I knew his name, so I could look him up and see what his role was in bringing about this computer-run world, where I can make friends with someone in Australia, exchange messages regularly, and have the communication pass instantly and without charge. Or where I can write a note of affection for a deceased friend on my computer one month, and have it reach his family and make a difference to both them and me several months later. Best of all, we have this forum where people affected by the mental health system can interact, share stories, strategize, support one another, and work together to improve a bad situation.

Computers are not always positive forces, of course. They allow our governments to keep tabs on our activities in ways Hitler could only have dreamt of. They tag people with mistakes they made as youths, so that they can never fully remake themselves and leave the past forgotten. They allow corporations and swindlers to shuttle fortunes from one corner of the globe to another with a few keystrokes, thus evading government control and opening whole new universes of expolitation and fraudulence.

But for once I would have to say that this particular technology is actually doing more good than harm (though I would not argue strenuously with someone who believed the opposite).

Writing this blog has brightened my life in countless surprising ways. I had hoped to build a platform for an eventual book. I don’t see that happening, but so many other connections and projects have blossomed, that it no longer matters. To tell the truth, I feel like I was born to blog. I’ve always enjoyed writing short essays about controversial, complex, or just interesting subjects (for instance, this was a role I got to play regularly when I served as Editor-in-Chief of the campus paper at UCSF). I’ve always liked to toy with visual imagery. I have a short attention span, but a wide ranging field of interest. I know a little about a lot of subjects (though a lot about almost none). I am not a very private person, and have never been uncomfortable discussing personal issues with groups of people I hardly know (like Alchoholics Anonymous). And I have a strong belief, bordering on a sense of obligation, that I should make my opinions known. I tend to think my ways of seeing things are unique, and that I have something to add to discussions about subjects that matter. (It is perhaps my one and only area of true self-confidence.) All-in-all, it makes me feel like I have at last found my true vocation: blogging. Too bad it isn’t an income, but it’s a good occupation.

Not many people read this blog. But those that do mean the world to me. Because of them, I write many days a week, for hours at a time. I explore other sites, read the opinions of others, and communicate with kind and fascinating people across the globe. I think more deeply and organize my ideas more thoroughly than I would otherwise. In the process, I learn more about the topics that matter to me, and begin to see ways I can use my education and (hopefully not imaginary) talents to further important causes. Most of all, I get to make friends with people who can understand what it’s like to live with a mind that operates differently than the norm. Who know the stigma and shame that mental conditions can bring. But who also share the hope that things can get better, and validate one another that very often, ‘different’ is another word for ‘better’.