The Dysfunctional Family

I call it Martin Luther's month, but actually all of February is African American history month. All races get to talk about, research, and debate the accomplishments of African Americans both dead and living. For a while there I was intent on introducing a new name to the list of eminent black people who had a hand in making our country great and proving that black people can do anything that white people can do. Maybe even do it better. Her name was Merze Tate, and she was from Michigan. Her parents were farmers who cultivated their 60 government-granted acres and sent their children to school, first in a one-room school house close to their home and then later to schools of higher education. Merze must have been at the very least an accomplished reader because she graduated with honors from a school that tolerated (but didn't welcome) students of the Negro race. And Negro was the term used in Merze's era. She grew up in the 1920s and never missed a day of school despit

It's President's Day and the only people really ecstatic about this holiday are those who get a paid vacation day and those who are aiming to sell a mess of "on sale" crap to materialistic hordes of people who don't want to stay home with their kids. Both feel rewarded because they figure they're getting free money to do with what they want. Then there's the rest of us. We constitute the majority of the population, and it breaks down into these sectors: 25 percent who attend online or live observances to honor past presidents like Washington and Lincoln; another 25 percent who read or make use of e-media to learn about the Kennedys and other  eminent skeletons in the presidential closet; 25 percent who hate the current President and spend idle moments thinking of workable assassination plots; and the remaining 25 percent who love, adore and worship at the feet of Donald Trump and like the Pied Piper of Hamelin tale, would follow the Donald over the cliff

There's a growing trend to make funerals livelier, "celebrations of life." That's okay for the most part unless the person whose life is being honored has been in jail, abused pets, or killed a lot of harmless creatures like geckos, ants, spiders, and flies. You know who these people are. They usually giggle a lot, especially when they hear about a new antidefoliant like Agent Orange (not so old, but way bad1)They look like butter wouldn't melt in their mouth, but underneath that hard exterior is a confusing tangle of nefarious motivations. But back to the fun at funerals goal. I'm going to a funeral today and I hardly know the deceased. His significant partner is someone I casually know from a club that I quit because most of the members were a-holes. So I have mixed feelings about attending a service for an unknown person when the other attendees are people who cheered when I finally quit the club or made it possible for me to quit without giving a hoot. H

I usually google my name on a regular basis--just to see if I've shown up in the obits--but lately, the geniuses at Google have misspelled and mistook me for Darren Aronofsky. That is the correct spelling of his name, and by all reports in the entertainment world, he is a star in the movie making sector. I'm not sure I've seen any of his films (the latest being "Mother," which got mixed reviews), but even though he's a celeb, I'm not happy being confused with him. And it happens all the time on Google. It's really my husband's fault since I took his last name a million years back when we married. But little did I know then that anyone would choose to spell Arenofsky "Aronofsky," thus confusing all the little minds out there in googleland. I figured Arenofsky was hard enough of a challenge, so people would furrow their brows and concentrate on getting this right. And for a good two decades, they did get it right. But along came Darren Ar

The God question always hovers in the background whenever a person is struck down by any kind of illness. Got cancer? Why did God force this on me? So what if I smoked three packs of cigarettes for 10 years--I still should have fallen under the God Protection Clause if the Big Guy was really up there looking after my welfare. Even lesser diseases like acne and chronic diarrhea get blamed on a missing or decidedly malevolent God. The truth is we seek responsibility for our problems, and God can easily be singled out as the culprit. I don't know how many times when I was really depressed that I just knew God was MIA. How could he/she ignore my suffering, especially when I threw up my hands in despair and crawled into bed like a child hugging a stuffed animal. Grown adult women should not have to grab a teddy bear to get comfort from pain. If God engineered that scenario he has a childish sense of humor that risks embarrassing the people who need him most. Now I ask you, Is that fai

I'm almost embarrassed to admit that until yesterday I didn't know there was a term for  non-stigmatizing your mental illness. It's called Mad Pride and obviously the "pride" part is a step-sister of Gay Pride, Black Pride, and all the other "pride" designations out there that I probably don't know about. I'm embarrassed because not only do I suffer from chronic depression, but I sometimes write about it in magazines and like now, in  blogs. I even did a story on the stigma of mental illness for a well-known magazine. Until yesterday I might have thought Mad Pride meant something like "everyone is entitled to get angry once in a while, so don't fret about it." But like so many guesses of mine, I'm wrong. From what I gather Mad Pride means ending the shame of not being like the "normals," and it includes illnesses like depression, anxiety, OCD, Bipolar, and everything else on the psychologically dysfunctional spectrum

I wasn't always so distrustful. There was a time when gullibility ruled, and I'd believe just about anything that anyone told me. Driver's Ed in high school is a good example of how I allowed those in authority to control my fate. From the moment I squashed into the back seat of that white nondescript Ford compact that was the standard vehicle for school instruction, I knew I'd be low man on the totem pole--that is to say, I'd have to compete with two high normals, as in kids who were smart and didn't struggle with anxiety and worries as I did. There was Nancy from my junior high school sewing class who looked like she stepped out of Little House on the Prairie and Bob, a schizoid type personality who acted like a juvenile delinquent but scored high enough on SATs to get into Yale. I intuited correctly that Nancy was a pro sewer. I knew this on sight because it was obvious from her demeanor and dress that Nancy had been sewing up a storm for years. She was the