Don Julio

Here's to my second entry of the day. I felt I had better update myself with the news that finding a name for my new fish was successful at work tonight. He has been christened Don Julio, after the tequila. I am enjoying a 650 mL bottle of Imperial Gemini ale in celebration. I bought it a week or two ago to try. I only bought it because Gemini is my zodiac sign. It's 10.5 % alcohol by volume, so it's a very in your face beer, just as I expected. My slightly biased opinion is that it is rather delicious. I feel that it embodies Gemini spirit well. After I finish this bottle I believe I will be feeling pretty good. Not drunk, but buzzed and tipsy happy. It's pretty spicy, and the bottle says it is a blended unfiltered ale. My first taste was a little overwhelming, but now I am beginning to taste a melange of flavors that I am enjoying. I feel it would be wrong if this beer didn't have a slight bitter edge. It's Gemini, after all. We are multi-faceted people. I think Gemini's at their best are interested and interesting. It's hard to define us as just one thing, because we can be so many things.

I find the zodiac intriguing. I know a little about a lot of the signs, mostly basic things. To me, it's odd how accurate it is. I am a Gemini through and through. I do not fit any of the other zodiacal sign descriptions. Of course, this is not to say that all Gemini's are the same people. I think that people take the zodiac too absolutely. We tend to have certain character traits in common. Some of them are flaws we share. We can be incredibly different people with different personalities, but if you were to read our zodiacal sign description, we would find we have a lot of those traits in common. Talkers. Writers. Thinkers. We just talk, write, and think differently. Unable to sort through emotional depths, and tend to run from them. Airy and bright. At our worst, hyper-critical and insensitive to others needs. Yes. Yes, yes, and yes.

I feel as if my zest for life has returned. Depression always brings about anhedonia. I find this its most intriguing symptom: No longer finding joy in things which used to bring you joy. No longer finding pleasure in things you normally find pleasurable. Very, very interesting. If you don't experience anhedonia, you do not have clinical depression. Depression is only clinically relevant if one of the number of symptoms you experience is anhedonia. I believe it is that coupled with three or four of a long list of other symptoms to make depression a clinical issue.
Amazing. I actually did learn some things in college.
Anhedonia is awful. I remember the example my professor gave in class to illustrate: if every day her daughter runs up to her after school and says "Mommy!" and that moment every day makes her entire day happy no matter what has occurred or will occur...and suddenly losing that. Her daughter runs up to her and hugs her and says "Mommy!" and she feels nothing but the same as she did before. Only emptiness. She gets no pleasure or happiness from that simple thing. That's anhedonia. Wild. It happens and you don't even know it. You only understand when it is over, and you start to see things again. You start to feel things again. People often think of depression as simply constant unhappiness, but you can be unhappy without being depressed. Depression is more a general numbness. You lose all joy and pleasure out of life. Everything can seem dull and lifeless, even sunshine. Unhappiness accompanies depression because there's no way to not be unhappy when nothing gives you pleasure. For me, the only thing bad about overcoming depression is a general fear that it will return. It quite literally feels as if a dark curtain has lifted from over the world and you can see clearly all around you. It's how I imagine I would feel if I were blind for a long time and suddenly were able to see. Wild. It's all perception. Thanks to this beer, perception is appropriately muddled. I am one of those people who can feel alcohol when it takes effect, but I also can control myself if need be. It takes quite a bit before I get to a point I can't control myself at all. I don't think I ever really lose all control except at the point where blackout would occur. Some people are more easily swayed by alcohol's advances. I don't know whether or not this is a good or a bad thing. I just have never been one of those people who would get drunk and then make excuses for my behavior based on being drunk. It is not a good excuse, in my opinion. As long as you are aware of the effects of alcohol on your system, then you should be well aware of the fact that as you drink more of it, the more your inhibitions are lowered, and the more risks you might take. This voice is never silenced by alcohol unless you are in a blackout state, as far as I am concerned. Some people choose to ignore it. That is their choice, and therefore if they behave badly under the influence of alcohol it is still their fault. It doesn't excuse rape, so it certainly doesn't excuse cheating on someone, for example. I despise that shit. "But I was drunk..." No. Being intoxicated negates nothing. All it means is that you were running from something and you used alcohol as an excuse to behave badly. You fail. There comes a point where you are not 16 anymore. Some people never figure this out, unfortunately. They come through my line in the packy everyday. I see multitudes of them. America is not very thoughtful when it comes to their citizens general well-being. I love this country, but man are there some fucked up things about it. I do not hate America, but I also believe that at this point America can do better than it is, and I think a large part of that is education. I think there's a huge disparity in education in America. Some people are highly educated and others are just...not. It tends to cause problems. Everyone needs to be educated. I personally think that those in positions of power in our country enjoy the fact that so many Americans are uneducated. It doesn't take too much to sort out why. The simple fact of the matter is, though, that we spend a lot of time talking about equality here, and how everyone should be equal. People are NOT equal, though, and some can't be. Some are not as educated as others. What we are really shooting for, and should be, is equal opportunity, regardless of race, sex, religious affiliation, etc. With equal opportunity for everyone, natural inequalities will happen regardless. There will be people who are smart and those who are dumb. There will be people who exploit everything and people who live very honestly. The problem people have is that they are always labeling everyone, putting them into a neat little box, and ignoring the ones who fall outside that box. There are racial stereotypes and gender stereotypes which hold very true, but in order to uphold them, we ignore all the people who fall outside that stereotype, or try to come up with ways to force them to be that stereotype, even if they aren't. Everything is ironic. Everything is a contradiction. Welcome to America.