The La Brea Tarpit of Deep Despair
Jun. 21st, 2011 11:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraI’m having a really, really difficult time right now and I don’t know what to do about it.
Is help even an option?
Help from whom? What would this help consist of?
I keep coming back to the fact that the novel is coming along really well and I suppose ten years from now when I look back at this period of my life, what I’ll remember about it – since I have such a bad memory and never remember anything but the broadest outlines of my past –is writing the novel. Regardless of what happens with the novel. It’s very, very good and I know it.
In the meantime I feel so hopeless. Hopeless and sad and pathetic and invisible…
Sure, it’s depression – but it’s situational depression: my life is really awful. Just work and work and more work that never earns quite enough money to keep it all in check, and no friends – not even activity partners – and I know it’s a trap I built for myself, keep building for myself., but that knowledge doesn't change anything.
Oh, hey! I do know what I want. I want somebody to say, “Come visit me for a week. You’ll have to sleep in the bathtub but we’ll have adventures and talk about the meaning of the universe…”
###
Reuben isn’t exactly flaking. It’s just that he’s working so hard and duck insemination is such a specialized task that during the summer he puts in 14 hour days routinely, and thus is too exhausted to come to ESL class most of the time. So I took on a second student, a lovely young Tibetan woman named Bolormaa (not her real name.)
Reuben and Balormaa are both political refugees of sorts and know nothing about each others’ worlds so I hit upon the idea of having Balormaa read a book about El Salvador and Reuben read a book about Tibet. YA books, of course. They read the books out loud to me while I correct their pronunciation and take notes of unfamiliar vocabulary and grammatical constructions and then we review those.
So last week Balormaa ran across two words she did not know: Holy and sin.
Balormaa is a Tibetan Buddhist. Apparently there are no corresponding concepts in Tibetan Buddhism to holy or sin.
I finally got holy across by explaining that it meant greatly beloved by God. Balormaa has a hard time with monotheism of course, but her eyes brightened: “Ah! Like they call the Dalai Lama ‘His Holiness!’”
“Exactly!”
“But you know there is no meaning for that in Tibetan.”
I found it impossible to explain the meaning of sin, though.
“It’s sort of like you’re breaking a law, but it’s God’s law,” I said.
“But God has no laws,” Balormaa said.
“Well, maybe not in Tibet. He sure has a lot of them in the rest of the world. Sins are things that God thinks it’s wrong to do, like stealing or murdering –“
“Ah! Because they’re bad karma!”
“No, not like karma at all. In Christianity, there's no such thing as reincarnation –“
I never was able to explain the concept to my own satisfaction.
Is help even an option?
Help from whom? What would this help consist of?
I keep coming back to the fact that the novel is coming along really well and I suppose ten years from now when I look back at this period of my life, what I’ll remember about it – since I have such a bad memory and never remember anything but the broadest outlines of my past –is writing the novel. Regardless of what happens with the novel. It’s very, very good and I know it.
In the meantime I feel so hopeless. Hopeless and sad and pathetic and invisible…
Sure, it’s depression – but it’s situational depression: my life is really awful. Just work and work and more work that never earns quite enough money to keep it all in check, and no friends – not even activity partners – and I know it’s a trap I built for myself, keep building for myself., but that knowledge doesn't change anything.
Oh, hey! I do know what I want. I want somebody to say, “Come visit me for a week. You’ll have to sleep in the bathtub but we’ll have adventures and talk about the meaning of the universe…”
Reuben isn’t exactly flaking. It’s just that he’s working so hard and duck insemination is such a specialized task that during the summer he puts in 14 hour days routinely, and thus is too exhausted to come to ESL class most of the time. So I took on a second student, a lovely young Tibetan woman named Bolormaa (not her real name.)
Reuben and Balormaa are both political refugees of sorts and know nothing about each others’ worlds so I hit upon the idea of having Balormaa read a book about El Salvador and Reuben read a book about Tibet. YA books, of course. They read the books out loud to me while I correct their pronunciation and take notes of unfamiliar vocabulary and grammatical constructions and then we review those.
So last week Balormaa ran across two words she did not know: Holy and sin.
Balormaa is a Tibetan Buddhist. Apparently there are no corresponding concepts in Tibetan Buddhism to holy or sin.
I finally got holy across by explaining that it meant greatly beloved by God. Balormaa has a hard time with monotheism of course, but her eyes brightened: “Ah! Like they call the Dalai Lama ‘His Holiness!’”
“Exactly!”
“But you know there is no meaning for that in Tibetan.”
I found it impossible to explain the meaning of sin, though.
“It’s sort of like you’re breaking a law, but it’s God’s law,” I said.
“But God has no laws,” Balormaa said.
“Well, maybe not in Tibet. He sure has a lot of them in the rest of the world. Sins are things that God thinks it’s wrong to do, like stealing or murdering –“
“Ah! Because they’re bad karma!”
“No, not like karma at all. In Christianity, there's no such thing as reincarnation –“
I never was able to explain the concept to my own satisfaction.
