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Max Agonistes Plus a Favorite Quotation
Nov. 29th, 2009 09:50 amI regarded Paris. with its grey-toned days and charcoal nights, merely as the chance setting for the most authentic and faithful joys of my life: the colored phrase in my mind under the drizzle, the white page under the desk lamp awaiting me in my humble home. – Vladimir Nabokov
Phone conversations w/Max really disturbed me. Parenting him was the one thing I could say I’d gotten right, so if he’s fucked up now – he says he is, should I believe him? – and if he’s pointing the finger ever so slightly in my direction, then I didn’t even get that right.
“I don’t want to end up like you,” he said towards the end of the conversation. It was a throwaway line in a long, vague, frustrating dialogue. I didn’t personalize it. I thought, Right – I don’t want to end up like me either. (And there’s a decent chance I won’t. My narrative isn’t over yet.)
He says he’s depressed.
I’m sorry, but what the hell does any 22-year-old white American male with a car who’s not in the military have to be depressed about?
So I do the Mommy thing, trot out all the reasons he may be feeling anxious, position them like clay pigeons in the sky for him to shoot down which, of course, he does –
Bang, bang! No, he’s not feeling anxious about the fact that he’s graduating. Transition from 16 years of the schooling game to the working world? Piece o’cake, Mom. Get real.
Nyaaaaaaaahhhhh, BAM! No, it isn’t because he has such a competitive nature and Stanford is so competitive so that for the first time in his life he’s up against people who are not only as smart (or smarter) than he is but moreover study far longer hours so that they snag the A’s and all that’s left for him are the B+’s. Any idiot knows that, Mom.
“Well, are you exercising enough?” I chatter on manically. “’Cause you know you’re like your father there. Both of you have this intense need for physical exercise. If you don’t work out intensely for at least one hour a day, you fall into this deep well of angst –“
“I exercise, okay?” he snapped.
Okay. Very, very irritating when parents play this game of Twenty Questions. Actually I wouldn’t know this from personal experience since when I was Max’s age, my mother never had the slightest interest in my wellbeing. But I’ve seen this conversation milked for laughs in innumerable sit coms over the years.
I guess when it comes right down to it, I’m confused. Sympathetic. But not empathetic.
He tells me he’s endogenously depressed. Since he snagged this gig with this very prestigious behavioral psychology lab that does MRI mapping for common emotions, I guess he’s had the opportunity to see the colored lights popping on in his brain.
“So, like... are you taking medication for it?” I ask.
He says no. He’s doing the talk therapy thing.
“Is it helpful?”
Not so far. He rambles and rambles, and the shrink just sits there, pushing his glasses up and down his nose.
It’s not that I don’t believe in endogenous depression. I do. But I think the circuitry between body and brain is a bit more malleable that the manufacturers of Prozac might have you believe. When people on long term maintenance doses of antidepressants trot out the diabetes analogy – which they invariably do – I bite my tongue. It’s not helpful for them to hear that I think they should take up marathon running or give up computer networking for a few months in favor of social venues that star real live breathing bodies. In fact it would probably make them mad enough to drop me as a friend.
I do think antidepressants can be useful in crisis situations. I wish I’d succeeded in getting my mother on them – it would have made her last six months a whole lot more pleasant.
Anyway I don’t know what the fuck is going on with Max. He’s back with Molly which under the circumstances I can only view as a bad thing since now she’s a caretaker, right?
I suspect what he’s feeling really are the graduation jitters. So easy for life to turn into a conveyor belt. So hard to carve out your life by hand – and then there’s the kicker that so many hand-carved lives are failures by the world’s standards. The assembly line is certainly safer. And easier.
Phone conversations w/Max really disturbed me. Parenting him was the one thing I could say I’d gotten right, so if he’s fucked up now – he says he is, should I believe him? – and if he’s pointing the finger ever so slightly in my direction, then I didn’t even get that right.
“I don’t want to end up like you,” he said towards the end of the conversation. It was a throwaway line in a long, vague, frustrating dialogue. I didn’t personalize it. I thought, Right – I don’t want to end up like me either. (And there’s a decent chance I won’t. My narrative isn’t over yet.)
He says he’s depressed.
I’m sorry, but what the hell does any 22-year-old white American male with a car who’s not in the military have to be depressed about?
So I do the Mommy thing, trot out all the reasons he may be feeling anxious, position them like clay pigeons in the sky for him to shoot down which, of course, he does –
Bang, bang! No, he’s not feeling anxious about the fact that he’s graduating. Transition from 16 years of the schooling game to the working world? Piece o’cake, Mom. Get real.
Nyaaaaaaaahhhhh, BAM! No, it isn’t because he has such a competitive nature and Stanford is so competitive so that for the first time in his life he’s up against people who are not only as smart (or smarter) than he is but moreover study far longer hours so that they snag the A’s and all that’s left for him are the B+’s. Any idiot knows that, Mom.
“Well, are you exercising enough?” I chatter on manically. “’Cause you know you’re like your father there. Both of you have this intense need for physical exercise. If you don’t work out intensely for at least one hour a day, you fall into this deep well of angst –“
“I exercise, okay?” he snapped.
Okay. Very, very irritating when parents play this game of Twenty Questions. Actually I wouldn’t know this from personal experience since when I was Max’s age, my mother never had the slightest interest in my wellbeing. But I’ve seen this conversation milked for laughs in innumerable sit coms over the years.
I guess when it comes right down to it, I’m confused. Sympathetic. But not empathetic.
He tells me he’s endogenously depressed. Since he snagged this gig with this very prestigious behavioral psychology lab that does MRI mapping for common emotions, I guess he’s had the opportunity to see the colored lights popping on in his brain.
“So, like... are you taking medication for it?” I ask.
He says no. He’s doing the talk therapy thing.
“Is it helpful?”
Not so far. He rambles and rambles, and the shrink just sits there, pushing his glasses up and down his nose.
It’s not that I don’t believe in endogenous depression. I do. But I think the circuitry between body and brain is a bit more malleable that the manufacturers of Prozac might have you believe. When people on long term maintenance doses of antidepressants trot out the diabetes analogy – which they invariably do – I bite my tongue. It’s not helpful for them to hear that I think they should take up marathon running or give up computer networking for a few months in favor of social venues that star real live breathing bodies. In fact it would probably make them mad enough to drop me as a friend.
I do think antidepressants can be useful in crisis situations. I wish I’d succeeded in getting my mother on them – it would have made her last six months a whole lot more pleasant.
Anyway I don’t know what the fuck is going on with Max. He’s back with Molly which under the circumstances I can only view as a bad thing since now she’s a caretaker, right?
I suspect what he’s feeling really are the graduation jitters. So easy for life to turn into a conveyor belt. So hard to carve out your life by hand – and then there’s the kicker that so many hand-carved lives are failures by the world’s standards. The assembly line is certainly safer. And easier.
