Unemployed-bored-bummed and useless blues

What is it about depression that makes one so endlessly tired? I knew a girl my freshman year of college who slept 16 hours a day. We eventually staged an intervention. Or maybe it's not always physical exhaustion but mental. I remember lying on the couch in my college house once, staring at the ceiling. My roommate came in.
"Oh, are you taking a nap?"
"No."
"Do you want me to turn the TV on?"
"No."
Eventually she covered me with a blanket and turned off all the lights. This amused me so much I was actually able to get up again 2 hours later.
Mostly it's the brain fuzz that bothers me. I picked up my phone tonight without knowing why. I stared at it for a full 10 seconds before I realized it was ringing. It's taken me 2 hours to write this.
There are two strategies I have when faced with depression.
#1 Distract yourself
Go drinking (not endorsed by this company), call someone, put on hideous makeup, eat nauseating amounts of chocolate. Yu Cheung, my wise Chinese mentor, calls these things "state modulators," a real term for dealing with the mentally ill. Often people with brain damage send themselves into fits. You cannot talk them out of it and if you wait it out, it sometimes gets worse. Even if you find what set them off and make it stop, it's too late, their mind is already in that fit. So you use a trigger: food, a smell, cherry chapstick, music, to literally modify their state. Works the same way with the depressed. We're going to Great America on Sunday. Riding roller coasters should do it for me.
#2 Ride it out (aka Give In)
Know that it will end someday. This is the most important part. Understand that you will not pay any bills, clean your house or function properly for the rest of the day and accept that. Get into bed. Turn off lights. Pull a blanket over your head. Cry, if necessary, or drink until you pass out. Often #2 is used only after #1 fails. It helps if you stop showering and answering your phone. You only eat food that is already in your fridge. Never mind cooking or scraping off the mold. At this point your sense of humor will dessert you entirely, as will your ability to, um...

My name is Jasmine and I'm an addict

One cool November morning, almost a year ago now, I came into work almost an hour late. My eyes were bloodshot and my hands were shaking so hard I couldn't hold a book. Nothing I said made any sense. My boss leaned in to smell my breath. "Are you...? Is that..? You have chocolate on your face!" That's right. I was tweaked out on chocolate and didn't care who knew about it. I had been to the chocolate festival.
It's almost that time again, ladies and gentlemen. The 8th Annual New York Chocolate Festival is coming to town. Be still my beating heart. No seriously. Calm down. You've had too much chocolate again. There were sharply dressed men on every corner holding plates of chocolate. Sellers extolled the virtues of 83% cocao chocolate versus 79% and FORCED you to try both. There was alcohol. There were cooking demonstrations. There was chocolate art: dresses, houses, paintings. And there was, if you can even imagine the joy without fainting, thick, syrupy chocolate coffee. It's November 10-13. For details, click HERE. To read Joe's report of last year's experience, click HERE. For the pictures he took, click HERE.
In fact, doesn't that seem like a fantastic weekend all around to visit New York? Imagine: cold enough for a jacket, but no snow. Most of the tourists are gone. The Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center is already up, but no holiday shopping crowds yet. Sounds like heaven, doesn't it?

I wish I was a witch

I just finished the 6th Harry Potter book and I want to worship the ground J.K. Rowling walks on. She still peaked with number 4 story- and writing-wise, but none have been more earth shattering than this book. I'm sure she'll do more than 7. She show's no sign of slowing down. Maybe I'll move to Scotland.
I'm also intensely excited for the Fourth Movie, because of reasons mentioned above. I feel emotionally drained. I read number 6 in 2 and a half days, no matter how hard I tried to slow down.

Hurricanes

As I read aloud articles about Hurricane Katrina in the New York Times, Joe frantically tries to keep the website that his company hosts online and running smoothly. He is in charge of maintaining it, and it has crashed about a dozen times a day for the last three days. It is the home site of the United Jewish Federation and has a donation page on it for hurricane relief. There is simply too much traffic to handle. Donations have reached 1.2 million and are climbing. Every time it shuts down, Joe says, "I'm killing people."
Would someone give up the first time a donation didn't work? If just entering your credit card number on a website failed to send your donation through, would you try again tomorrow, or write a check, or do something else? They need money just as badly a month from now as they do today, but by then many people will have lost interest. I've read the paper three days in a row now, unheard of for me. We want to read the shocking stories, how police have quit and how babies are starving and women are being raped in the Superdome so we can all tut-tut and swear it wouldn't happen in our city. It's like the end of the world down there. I'm sure it'll make for a good movie someday.