Clinical

Several months ago, in this space, I had occasion to review the ramblings of an antipodean young lady who self-described herself as "crazy." Among her other sins, I took a bit of offense to this self label. It was inaccurate and signaled an underlying disregard for the identification of the correct descriptor. I berated her for choosing "crazy" because what she meant was "impulsive" and "impetuous." If I may quote myself, I told that young lady at the time "Real crazy and real insane is actually scary and dangerous. Not fun. Real crazy is hanging off the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge or hearing voices that aren’t there telling you to kill John Lennon."

Jacki, if you are still reading here, today's reviewee is somewhat close to the epitome of who I was talking about in that review. (Also, Jacki, if you are still reading here today, I encourage you to submit for a re-review. You have corrected your egregious sins. You would likely get a much improved review today.)

Pandora has been dealing with mental illness for years, and Confessions of a Serial Insomniac is where she records the trials and tribulations of what goes along with that.

She has a very full About Me section. Pages and pages and pages of orienting material. A glossary of terms and acronyms. A run down of who all the major players are and what her relationship to them is. Full background on what she has been able to identify as the inciting cause behind her initial breakdowns.

And let there be no question -- assuming that this is all honest and true (and there's no reason to doubt that's the case as far as I can tell), whatever mental illness she is experiencing is well earned and owned. Go through what she has and you'd likely be mentally ill as well.

Pandora generally writes clearly, yet very clinically. She conveys the facts of her mental illness very well, but only rarely seems to give real insight into what it feels like. It reads like a bit of a case study in a text book. And if the purpose of this is to serve as a record of a life or as a resource for others who are going through similar trials and tribulations, that may very well be appropriate. It wasn't what I was hoping for when I first saw the topic, and maybe that's just prurient selfishness on my part. Hard to say. But as one who's deepest experience with mental illness is a very occasional bout with Seasonal Affective Disorder and or mild depression, I wasn't able to latch onto this material the way I really wanted to.

The thing is, it seems to be something that she struggles with in her therapy sessions as well:

“OK,” Paul said, “but what did you feel?”

Not an easy question to answer.  I thought about how the way in which I’d described the incident here, but in the moment, that didn’t really seem to ‘get’ it.

So what can I say? That I'd like to see more catharsis? Feh. Easy for me to say from my comfortable house with my complete LACK of mental illness and trauma. Still, what I'm saying would probably make the individual entries a bit more compelling. The fact is, she doesn't glamorize or romanticize any of it -- she factualizes it. And perhaps that's a good thing to do. I'm not qualified to say anything about the illness part. But take a look at this, because this is more like what we're looking for here.

Okay, then. So what can she work on?

1. The entries are too long. If I were hired as her editor, the first thing I would tell her is to cut everything to 1/3 of the currrent length.
2. Lose the goddamned "Read More" links. Yeah, okay, they're probably there because the posts are so long, but I hate (hate, HATE, HATE!!!!) them. I probably didn't read as much of this as I should have partially because of that. (Partially because I have a deadline. Deal with it.)
3. Too much crap in the sidebar. At least the sidebar isn't longer than the page content. But there's still a hell of a lot going on, and the stuff I was looking for (archives) was hard to find in that haystack.
4. Reconsider the white text, black background. Although it doesn't bother me as much this time as usual because it kind of fits the subject matter, white text on a black background is hard on my eyes.

My final word of advise is going to come across as a bit condescending, maybe. I don't mean it to, but will understand why it is interpreted that way. I am trying to figure out why Pandora is writing this blog. What is the goal? Is it simply a diary of her mental illness? Is it to serve as a form of advocacy? And because that goal wasn't clear to me, it was very hard to assess whether she was successfully achieving her goal. Which is one of the key things I try to assess in these reviews. It seemed to me that she may be writing "just because" without a clear goal in mind. If that's the case, I might encourage her to find a goal for this and strive toward it. If it's NOT the case, and she has a goal, I might encourage her to identify that goal for the readers.

And that's that.

For what it's worth, I bet I know several people in real life who could have written this blog, except for the residing in Ireland part, and I like them all. So, in the end, I am willing to bet that if I were to know Pandora in real life, I'd probably consider her a friend.

Pandora's rating: One star.

Once There Was This Discarded Note I Found...

Once, as a wee bairn of maybe 11 or 12 years of age, while walking along an unfamiliar street with my gang of hoodlums, we spied a discarded scrap of paper along the way. Nine hundred and ninety nine times out of a thousand, I leave the scrap where it lies. But for some reason, on this day, something inside me says "pick it up and read it." Having learned the hard way what happens when I ignore the voices in my head, I picked that scrap up and read it.

It wasn't addressed to anyone specific and no individuals were mentioned by name, but this little scrap of paper told a dramatic story of lust, betrayal, greed and larceny. I was transfixed. I clearly knew none of these people, but the anger and hostility leaped off the page in a way that it didn't matter whether I knew them or not. I wanted to know more, what happened next, whether the one "bitch ho" was going to get her due comeuppance for stealing the other "bitch ho"'s boyfriend or not.

Alas, I never did find out, as the note was incomplete.

As I read through Nuts 4 Fruits, I felt some of those same stirrings of having read a lovely story about whom I knew nothing, really. Even after reading hundreds of posts, I still do not really know all that much about our intrepid author. I can infer many things, but these inferences may very well be wrong. I know that the author is female, lives in Toronto, wants to be a hermit, and has had a long-distance relationship for seven years. I suspect that she once lived in Africa, at times lives with or near her mother (referred to in these pages merely as "The Survivor"), and takes vacations with her significant other (referred to in these pages as "The Phantom"). I assume she is in her (early?) thirties. And I believe that she works in statistics or data processing or something.

Oh, and she seems to really like shopping at Ikea. And she's a non-militant vegetarian type. That is, until very recently.

She speaks vaguely of dark times in the past, but aside from mentioning that they were there, and implying somehow that the Survivor is called the Survivor somehow because of the survival of these dark times, she does not speak of them at all. Like 'The One Who Must Not Be Named,' she speaks OF the dark times, but not ABOUT the dark times. (And today I am finding it difficult to locate specific references to these times. Dammit, I should have written this down.)

I am left with merely the impression of a person. A shadow of a human life. And I desperately want to know more. I want to know why she chose to be a vegetarian, or if it was even a choice. I want to know why she lives in Toronto when she clearly despises the cold. I want to know why it makes sense for The Phantom to be living in Texas while she lives in Toronto. I want to know more about the sort of relationship that starts with enough trust that the Phantom allows her to spy on him all the time via a webcam and yet seems to shy away from the label "relationship."

I don't get these answers.

Instead, I get the mundane, day-to-day life of a young woman rendered somewhat sublime through the written word. Many posts, maybe half of them, read like a stream of consciousness William Carlos Williams poem. Accessible, yet perfectly capturing the feelings and essences of a moment. I can almost feel the breezes, smell the scents, taste the foods.

The other half of the posts? Meh. "What I bought at Ikea." Or, "here's the code I used in R to make this graph."

In my last review, I talked about what I look for in the writing that I read. What I said:

Do you expand my mind? Do I find myself longing to read just one more post? Do you turn a phrase in a new and fresh way that causes me to look anew upon the mundane and everyday?

Guess what. This nutty fruit (or should I say fruity nut?) does just that. About half of the time. I started way back at the very beginning, and each post was a short sweet little breath or glimpse of what that particular moment in time felt like and seemed like. She captured the essence artfully. Avoiding cliches. And I just kept reading, more and more, like a good book I just couldn't put down. Until I was done and looking at the most recent post.

And I loved her for it. About half of the time.

This is not to say that she is all that and a bag of crackers. Henry David Thorough once famously stated something about the majority of people living a life of quiet desperation, and it seems at times as though our intrepid hermit is doing just that. And as much as it goes against my grain to suggest that my review of a blog should be taken as a review of someone's life, reading posts about wistful regrets over choices made (mind you, choices that I can't say for sure I ever really understood, as she never lays out what options were really there), brought to mind a line from The Shawshank Redemption: "Get busy living or get busy dying."

I would love for her to get busy living.

And, as much as I love the way she captures a moment, some semblance of a framework to hang those moments on would be useful and helpful as well. I mean, crap, she's even blocked the viewing of her Blogger profile. I just spent the last 5 years with her, and I still don't know what to call her, what race she is, or why she loves to visually chart data.

So quit being so damn coy.

Okay. That's it.

Now here's the real shocker. The rating. Three stars.



Give me some framework and start chasing those dreams, and leave what you bought at Ikea to your Facebook profile, and you'll shoot right up to four stars or even maybe an "I Fucking Love You." Because, I do. In fits and starts. But not consistently enough to earn that as an overall rating.