Another bonus of my job?

I’m sitting at the front desk, and right in front of me one of the students is doing her on-line course work and looking at closeups of cadavers. Some pictures are body shots, others are close-ups of muscles and tendons and such.

Pretty neat, actually. And far more interesting than the drunken friends on Facebook the girl next to her is viewing.

John Scalzi finally went to the Creation Museum. Essay AND a photo set with snarky comments!

My favorite part is “vegetarian dinosaurs.”

According to this fun and exciting quiz, I don’t have asperger’s or autism. Yippee!

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I read a fascinating article this morning on the Amish and forgiveness.

Really, it’s interesting. Go read it.

Back? Good.

First of all, I find it astounding that they are able to forgive so quickly and seemingly easily. That has to be very, very hard. But it also gives me great hope, to know that human beings are actually capable of forgiveness, even under such terrible circumstances. Maybe the human race isn’t completely doomed after all.

I also note that they separate forgiveness from grief. Because you have forgive someone, it doesn’t seem to mean that you don’t still feel grief for the loss. That’s kinda important. You can still feel pain about a situation, but it doesn’t necessarily help to feel anger as well as pain.

But forgiveness is a very hard thing. It’s something that comes up sometimes when you’re dealing with depression. Even if your depression isn’t caused by something that someone did to you, it may be caused by an inability to forgive yourself.

My depression falls into the later category. For the most part, I can get beyond things that people do to me (I do tech support. If I took everything personally my head would have exploded years ago.) but I find it far harder to forgive similar lapses in myself. After all, I did some pretty stupid stuff when I was younger, so it’s easy for me to see where other people are coming from. It’s far harder to accept stupidity from myself, after all, I should have known better, right?

Not really. But that doesn’t always stop me.

So maybe I need to take a lesson from the Amish and forgive. Forgive those who have hurt me, but also forgive myself, because I am just as deserving of my own forgiveness as anyone else.

You may have seen this already, but if you haven’t, there’s an amusing article on the British Daily Mail of a small dog that discovered a part of a mammoth bone on the beach.

The picture of the dog in front of the bone is worth clicking over.

For the past three or four years, I’ve been trying to go to the gym five days a week to walk and do weight training. Since my depression kicked in this summer, it’s been far more off than on, and for the past three weeks, I haven’t gone to the gym at all. Now I’m still trying to walk at least 20 minutes at lunch, and I do walk around a lot during the day, but this is a pretty serious decrease in exercise.

Yesterday, the nurse came by to give us physicals so we can get life insurance.

I’ve lost 3 1/2 pounds since the last time I was at the gym (which puts me 1.2 pounds away from my goal weight), my blood pressure was 98 over 60, and my pulse rate was relatively (for me) low.

This is ridiculous. I don’t need reinforcement for NOT going to the gym.

However, I’m still going to get my butt in gear and start going back, because exercise twice a day helps a good deal in fighting my depression.

But still. Although I’m glad that I’m so healthy, that wasn’t the kind of reinforcement I needed.

(I tried to figure out how to put more “e” sounds in that title, but that was as good as I could come up with on short notice.)

Went to check the weather, and noticed a strange weather pattern around Pittsburgh. When I went to look at the animated regional radar, it looked even more creepy.

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I’m not saying there isn’t something to it, I’m just saying that my first reaction to this:

WVU researchers studying nutritional benefits of krill
Mention krill, and whales might come to mind. The tiny shrimp-like
crustaceans are the food of choice for whales – nutritionally dense,
easily harvested and abundant. It’s those same qualities that make krill
seem like a short-list candidate for the next big protein source to a
pair of WVU researchers. Drs. Janet Tou and Jacek Jaczynski, assistant
professors in WVU’s Davis College of Agriculture, Forestry and Consumer
Sciences, have been collaborating with Taiwanese scholar Yi-Chen Chen on
a study of the nutritional benefits of krill for human consumption. The
research was featured in a recent issue of Nutrition Reviews.

…was to giggle.

I have to say that reading about Elyn Saks made me feel as if my own mental struggles are nothing.

She’s a lawyer and educator who just published The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness that talks about her struggle with schizophrenia.

You can read an article on her as well.

Goats sacrificed to fix Nepal jet

Nepal’s state-run airline has confirmed that it sacrificed two goats to appease a Hindu god, following technical problems with one of its aircraft.

Really, I don’t think there’s anything I can add to that.

Scientists have identified genetic variations that affect specific neurotransmitter functions, which could explain why some patients respond to some drugs but not to others. For example, some depressed patients who have abnormally low levels of serotonin respond to S.S.R.I.’s, which relieve depression, in part, by flooding the brain with serotonin. Other depressed patients may have an abnormality in other neurotransmitters that regulate mood, like norepinephrine or dopamine, and may not respond to S.S.R.I.’s.

Considering that less than stellar luck I’ve had with antidepressants recently, that sounds like an excellent idea.

Maybe one day they’ll be able to do the same with other medications as well–I’d think it would be far easier to get a drug plan to pay for a medication if a doctor days that’s the medication that will work best for you.

Stealth vegetables for kids. (Okay, I just love the phrase “stealth vegetables.)

And more on the totally unshocking news–drinking soda is associated with poor diet and increased BMI, while drinking milk is associated with a higher nutrient intake and lower BMI.

Mmmm…. chocolate milk.

I tend to mull over touchy subjects for awhile, before I write about them. I didn’t used to do this, but when I started writing here five years ago, I think Erin was the only person reading, so it didn’t much matter what I said.

But now I must consider that what I write may well be read by current and future employers, which makes certain subjects even more difficult to write about than they are already.

At the top of that list is the subject of mental illness.

The Virginia Tech shootings have brought the subject of mental illness back into the spotlight, and in the most negative light possible.

Now I admit that I am lucky in that my depression and obsessive compulsive disorder are relatively mild, but despite that I have at multiple times in my life seen psychologists and psychiatrists and been on a variety of medications. And through those times I have typically feared discussing these health issues with others.

At the root of that silence is a sense of shame and embarrassment.

Consider the phrase “it’s all in your head.” Well, yes. It is all in my head. But that doesn’t mean that I can control it, no matter how hard I try. During our pre-marital counseling, we were asked whether we had a history of mental illness, when I responded yes, I suffered from depression (I was still in denial about my OCD at that point) the response was basically, “no, I meant a real mental illness.” As if depression were something I could control. As if my depression were something that did not affect my relationships and my life.

Consider the attitude most people have about mental illness. I had a direct supervisor who repeatedly referred to one of the local mental health facilities as “the nuthouse” and constantly used other disparaging terms to refer to those who suffer from mental illness.

Now, as I again consider therapy and medication to help me deal with problems that are slowly spiraling out of my control, I am afraid let people know what is happening in my life. Afraid that they will think less of me for an inability to control something that’s “all in my head.” Afraid that they’ll see me as a threat and a danger.

Which brings me to the disclosure of the mental illness of the shooter. There is now a discussion about the treatment of mental illness.

It is possible this could be a good thing–that treatment for mental illness will be easier to receive, and will be better covered by health insurance companies.

But it could also lead to a greater ostracization of those who suffer from mental illness. That mental illness will become grounds for losing your job or being kicked out of school, for the “safety” of other students or co-workers. That it will become easier to commit someone with mental illness against their will.

And that most people won’t see a problem with either of those things.

Scientists have developed a way of converting one blood group into another.

The technique potentially enables blood from groups A, B and AB to be converted into group O, which can be safely transplanted into any patient.

This won’t solve the blood shortages–there simply aren’t enough people donating blood. (And I can’t donate anymore, since doing so pushes me over the line into anemia.) But it may help those of us who are universal donors rather than universal recipients.