I have Microsoft Word. For no apparent reason, the toolbar at the top, without which I cannot do stuff like cut-and-paste, etc, has vanished. If I click "home" it comes back. But when it is present, I cannot actually type in the document. I can only type when the toolbar is gone.

Also, normally once I click "home" the toolbar stays. Now it vanishes as soon as I type anything.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!! HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ETA: Fixed!

Moon Child continues to grab my attention by the lapels, despite some dubious racial and gender issues (oddly mixed with some cool gender-bending and cameos by totally normal random people of color) and a somewhat tasteless use of real-life disasters. Whatever. It's totally awesome and awesomely insane! I urge you to read it!

It wins the prize for Most Bad Wrong Relationship Ever, given that the heroine is a boy named Jimmy who is supposedly twelve but acts six and is an alien mermaid who is a descendant of the Little Mermaid and was raised on the moon, swam through space to spawn on the Earth, and transforms into a beautiful woman-- with the mind of child!Jimmy-- named Benjamin and is the object of desire in her female form by the abusive Broadway dancer who has adopted Jimmy, and sort of in any form by the male mermaid who is desperate to father his eggs on her. Also, she sometimes wears panties on his head.

The biology of the mermaids is based on clown fish, in which the fish all hatch as androgynous, and then the most dominant becomes female and the second-most male. Others remain neuter. In Moon Child, all the mermaids are absolutely desperate to either become female and lay eggs, or father eggs, or find a father for their eggs. There is also spirit possession, resurrection, the Apollo astronauts, musings on water pollution and nuclear power, amnesia, backstage rivalry, cross-dressing ballet, and bargains with the undersea witch who gave the Little Mermaid her legs.

The art is incredibly beautiful and striking, the (unsurprisingly bizarre) omake are hilarious, and there are random pin-ups of the characters dressed a la the court of Louis XXIV. And endless discussions of "birthing eggs." And giant hallucinatory fish skeletons. Volcanic eruptions. The male mermaid sadly muses that his kiddie true love likes cake better than him. Why are you all not reading this already?

Last weekend Adrian and I went hiking and berry-picking with his friends.

( Berry-picking, hiking, and pet rescue skunk )

I just got tipped off that the Wikipedia edit war over whether or not my book should be mentioned in the extremely worshipful entry on Meher Baba, which is fiercely policed by Baba-lovers, has re-ignited. Page down to "Rachel Brown's book":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Meher_Baba

Last night I volunteered at a phone bank for Equality For All, the campaign to defeat the evil proposition on the California ballot this November to ban marriage between same-sex couples. We were trying to raise money and recruit volunteers.

The organizers cleverly suggested that we begin by calling people we know before moving on to lists culled from "contact me" sign-up sheets. I would not have thought of that, but I used personal contacts to raise $300 (my totals were the group's highest overall; I think I am good at fundraising) and obtain one volunteer, and the guy next to me called his college buddies and assembled a team of volunteers.

Before we began, we introduced ourselves and our reasons for being there. One woman said that as a black woman, she would have been legally denied civil rights in earlier times, and this struck her as a similar battle. A bunch of the men said they hoped to get married some day, either to a particular man or just in general. One of the people I spoke to on the phone said that her church had organized a campaign to raise awareness against the amendment in local farmer's markets! Others mentioned being strongly affected by this pro-marriage equality commercial.

As I drove home, I thought about how causes seem to choose us as much as we choose them. I don't like weddings. I don't like how you really have to fight to make them not commercialist, frou-frou and frilly, about enforced creepy gender roles, insanely expensive, incredibly depressing to single attendees, and long and boring. I don't like attending them, and the thought of ever having one myself does not exactly fill me with glee. As for marriage itself, I don't abhor the institution, but neither does it thrill me. So what is the single cause that has engaged me the most in the last five years or so? Marriage equality!

If I were to choose which cause I intellectually think is most important, it would probably be global warming and other potentially catastrophic environmental issues. Followed by world poverty, global inequality, famine, disease, war, and other issues that kill people in large numbers every day.

Out of all of those, the only ones that I've ever actually hit the streets for are AIDS-related issues and anti-war activism over specific wars. (And suspect that I am becoming even more of a peacenik than I was before due to now having a particular person whom I would like to keep out of the war zone.) The other causes that I've been seriously involved in over a span of years are GLBT rights, mentoring children, and emergency preparedness.

Though people can and do die as a direct or indirect result of being deprived of their civil rights, marriage equality, like mentoring children, seems a bit like small potatoes in the grand global "so many preventable deaths per minute" scheme of things. But every individual life is small potatoes on that scale.

Having grown up among people who were devoting themselves to grand ideals (union with God) while not noticing or caring about the very small-scale, but very real human suffering going on right in front of them, I think that even if the ideal is to tackle the biggest issues first, there's also value in fixing the things that you actually have the capability of fixing.

And passion lends capability. While swimming might be the ideal exercise for me, I don't enjoy swimming, so I never get around to actually doing any. Whereas I am willing to go do less ideal exercise if I actually enjoy it. Likewise, my passion, rather inexplicably, is leaping up and shouting, "Hit the streets to promote more marriages! Yeah brides!" and passing out on the sofa at the thought of global warming or malaria. Marriage equality it is!

What causes personally engage you guys? Is it clear why, or is it slightly inexplicable to you too? Are they different from what you would consider ideal or primarily important, or are they the same?

It's the 15th in India, right? If not... happy Day Before Independence Day!

The other day my remote car lock/unlock device died. I discovered this when, after a dental appointment, I could not remote-unlock the car. And as the remote-lock automatically sets the alarm, if you manually open the car, the alarm goes off and the car won't start.

After much fiddling, I phoned the dealership to ask how to manually turn off the alarm... and was told that you can't, and I'd either have to take a taxi to the dealership to get a new remote and then take it back to the car, or have to have the car towed! Alternatively, he added, the remote battery might be dead.

I proceeded to walk for half an hour, uphill and in the snow in the sun and on a street with no sidewalk, to the nearest hardware store to get that battery. Luckily a woman heard my hopeful inquiry about a bus back and gave me a ride. And yes. The car now starts. Has this ever happened to anyone else?

To relieve my stress (car, long hot walk, very painful tooth-cleaning), I went to the comic store where cyberpilate, who just won an Eisner Award (with others), works. I was really only looking for Tsubasa 18 DO NOT SPOIL and... er... more Moon Child. She pounced and proceeded to sell me Greg Rucka's Electra, Queen and Country, and Whiteout; Matt Fraction and Gabriel Ba's Casanova, Lea Hernandez's steampunk Cathedral Child, and a Thor one-shot called "Reign of Blood:"

Me: "I'm not into Thor."

Carla: "Look! They're raising a blood colossus!"

Shows me awesome splash page of giant zombie mecha.

Carla: "And there's Thor! Look, he's saying, 'I will pilot your blood colossus!'"

Me: "Sold!"

Also, I sold myself books one of DNAgents (collected-- blast from my past) and From Eroica With Love.

I should note that lots of this was on the 60% off shelf.

Anyone read any of these? Without plot spoilers... comments?

livelongnmarry raised over fifty thousand dollars!! And was appreciated by George Takei and Brad Altman (pictured in icon)!! And raised over $50,000!

To those of you expecting things from me that you won: I'm working on it! Hopefully you will get them soon!

Yesterday I came across an old photo album with two shots of me with a little blonde boy, Danny. I'm a teenager, he's about six. We're holding my kittens and a lop-eared rabbit.

Today, while looking up something else, I came across a comment I'd posted to one of Jim MacDonald's posts on Making Light. He's a paramedic in a rural area.

There's been an update to both my post and that photo, so I thought it was worth re-posting here, especially in light of my "car fire" thread:

Two accidents happened in July 2004.

I flipped my car off the freeway at about 65 mph, rolled it once or maybe twice. It was stopped by a clump of trees before it could continue in the direction it was heading, which would have landed it on top of an on-ramp.

The CHP officer who saw the wreck took several minutes to process what I was telling him, which was that I had been the driver. He couldn't believe I was standing on the shoulder with no visible injuries given the state of the car and the mechanism of the crash.

It turned out that I had cracked a vertebra and had chronic back pain for several years and possibly forever, though it's gotten a lot better recently. Still, I'm OK most of the time, my mobility isn't impaired, and I'm not, you know, dead. I had an airbag but it didn't go off. I was wearing my seatbelt, of course.

Later that month Danny, the 20-year-old son of some family friends was riding his bicycle when he got hit by a car at, apparently, a fairly slow speed. He was knocked down, broke his ankle but had no other injuries... except from where he hit his head on the curb. He can't walk. He can't talk. He can't eat solid food. He can't write. He's been making great progress in terms of answering questions by pointing to words on a page, though.

He lived like that for three years, but a few months ago he died. A lot of things can go wrong with the human body when it's almost completely paralyzed.

He was not wearing a helmet. I still cringe when I see helmetless bike riders.

I used to see lots of accidents when I lived in India, at a time when no car I ever encountered had a working seatbelt. At that time it had the world's highest rate of fatalities per motor vehicle accident. As a result of my time living there, I can tell you first-hand that one of the things that can happen if you get "thrown clear" is that your head and body may be thrown clear separately.

Obviously, occasionally cars catch fire. Even more occasionally, people die because their car burned and they were too badly injured or trapped by crushed metal to escape in time.

But the reason those cases always hit the papers is because they're so rare. When people get thrown from their cars and killed, or hit their heads and die three years later, it's so common that unless they're a celebrity, it's not news.

If you drive, buckle your seatbelt.

If you ride a motorcycle or bicycle, wear a helmet.

Danny would have turned 24 this year. I think I'll color-copy the snapshots I have of him and give the originals to his parents.

Funny, sad, angry, uplifting, and impossible to put down, this novel about a geeky teenage boy who leaves his school on the poverty-stricken Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an academically superior-- but all-white and all-rich-- high school is, along with Kathleen Duey's Skin Hunger, one of my two favorite YA novels I've read all year.

Here's Arnold "Junior" Spirit on his first day at the new high school. Roger is another student:

"Hey, Chief," Roger said. "You want to hear a joke?"

"Sure," I said.

"Did you know that Indians are living proof that niggers fuck buffalo?"

I felt like Roger had kicked me in the face. That was the most racist thing I'd ever heard in my life.

Roger and his friends were laughing like crazy. I hated them. And I knew I had to do something big. I couldn't let them get away with that shit. I wasn't just defending myself. I was defending Indians, black people, and buffalo.

Arnold/Junior draws cartoons, which are an integral part of the book. They're actually drawn by artist Ellen Forney, and they're terrific.

I'm not sure if what I loved most about this novel was Arnold's very convincingly teenage voice and personality, the way that even the most minor characters had depth and complexity and a point of view, or the way that Alexie manages to depict the appalling conditions on the rez, the brutal social conditions that produced it, and Arnold's moments of self-pity without either glossing over any of that or producing an awesomely depressing book. Or the cartoons. Loved the cartoons.

The book this reminded me of the most was Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, for its uncompromising grittiness, teenage protagonist who kept a sense of humor despite soul-crushing experiences (and found hope in art), and witty first-person narrative.

It also struck home to me on a personal level with its honest account of being stuck between two cultures, being a misfit, and the guilt and intoxicating freedom of walking away from one's childhood home, knowing that you've left others behind in terrible conditions that they are unlikely to be able to either improve or escape.

I'd read some of Alexie's short stories before (which I liked but which didn't really wow me), but none of his novels. Are any of his adult books anything like this? Which would you recommend?

I give up. From now on, all my food goes in the refrigerator.

Are there any common food items that will actually be ruined if I do this? If so, I'll keep them in Tupperware or something.

This weekend while driving in Pasadena I turned the corner and saw a plume of smoke. An SUV in a parking lot had flames erupting from the hood. No one was visible anywhere nearby.

I pulled over across the street, grabbed my fire extinguisher, and ran to the crosswalk. Two security guards ran up from the general direction of the burning SUV, and began stopping traffic.

I ran up to one and said, "Is anyone inside that vehicle?"

He said, "No. And I don't think you should get near it-- a fire truck is on its way, and that fire is getting bigger by the second."

I retreated across the street. There was a loud explosion from the SUV. The whole thing became enveloped in flames. The fire truck pulled up and extinguished it. They broke the windows and opened the doors, and smoke billowed out in great gray puffs. I then had a very bad moment when it occurred to me that I should have asked the guard the follow-up question, "Did you check?" But the firefighters didn't pull anyone out and I waited for quite a while, so I assume there had not been anyone inside.

When I later recounted this to Adrian (who is still in Denver), it occurred to me that perhaps burning vehicles are less uncommon than I imagined, and it is not so odd that I would have encountered this phenomenon three times.

"How many burning vehicles have you seen in your life?" I asked him.

"None," he replied. "So I leave for a week, and you get an earthquake and a flaming SUV... you just can't be left alone, can you?"

Public service announcement # 1: Vehicles do not normally catch fire following a crash! If a crashed vehicle is not burning and there are no other urgent safety hazards, do not attempt to extract the occupants or exit the vehicle! Crash victims should stay where they are and not move until medical personnell can make sure their spines are stabilized.

Public service announcement # 2: If a vehicle is already burning, especially if the engine is on fire, be aware that the fire can and probably will spread really fucking quickly. (This goes for non-vehicular fires as well.) I've now seen this happen twice. Get the hell out or get anyone inside out as fast as you can.

Scientific Livejournal Poll!

( Burning vehicle poll )

I am unlikely to provide content or tons of comments. I am stage managing this week for The Virginia Avenue Project, to which I invite those of you who live in Los Angeles, and am unlikely to be online much at all. Please check your friends lists or ibarw for actual content.

Does a CV intended to be used to apply to teach at a college level really have to be around twenty pages long?

I am coming to the horrible realization that it is going to take forever to dig up the records I need to put this damn thing together.

I hope that my really quite good professional credentials will make up for my lack of actual teaching experience here. Though everyone I've ever taught or critiqued has seemed happy with the results, I've only ever taught at one workshop, critiqued privately, and guest-lectured for one college class session and two high school sessions.

...yeah, I need to make more money. Also, I enjoy teaching.

Just when I think I'm inured to the insanity of manga, something like Reiko Shimizu's Moon Child comes along.

This remarkable work combines total freaking insanity with gorgeously surreal images and an astounding amount of plot for a first volume-- concluding with the mangaka's explanation that volume 1 is just a prologue, and the story really gets started in volume 2! I can't wait!

Jimmy is a blonde amnesiac child living in New York City with Art, an abusive, washed-up Broadway dancer who may or may not have a heart of gold. But unbeknownst to either of them, Jimmy is actually Benjamin, the beautiful daughter of the Little Mermaid, who was one of a race of alien mermaids who must return to Earth to spawn by mating with each other and laying eggs!

There are identical twins or clones or creepy illusions of Jimmy, backstage drama, poltergeist activity, telekinesis, demons biting people's heads, giant catfish swimming through the air above Time Square, and dialogue like "Space is like an ocean. I can swim there. That's how I got here, to the Planet Asgard. I was just a hatchling back then, so it took several hundred years."

It reminded me a bit of Please Save My Earth, only with extra bonus insanity.

Warning: the leader of the mermaids is drawn as a bizarrely stereotyped African woman. This is especially unfortunate as Shimizu manages to include other black characters who are not your typical manga stereotypes (a doctor, random mermaids), thus lulling me into a false sense of security.

A complete and hilarious review, with pictures.

What would be some good books to read to get an idea of what life on a lunar base might be like, about 100 years into the future? Nonfiction preferred, but reasonably plausible fiction OK. Good websites OK too.

1. I've already read Growing Up Weightless, Heinlein's juveniles, and John Varley's books. Ford's book was pretty realistic, right? Does anyone know what his sources were?

2. I don't have a hard science background, so I'm looking for works directed at the layperson.

3. Netflix seems to think that "moonbase" is a misspelling for "menopause."

Normally I hate it when authors self-promote by discussing how bad someone else’s book is and how much better theirs is. But it’s impossible for me to discuss Elizabeth Gilbert’s obnoxious memoir without at least mentioning my own (much better!) one, All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: An American Misfit In India, as they have some notable similarities and when I describe mine, people keep asking me if I’ve read hers. ("Oh, your book is about how you became a cynical atheist after growing up surrounded by crazy American hippies on an ashram in India? In that case, you will love this other book about how an American woman learns the meaning of life and finds enlightenment, self-worth, and joy on a beautiful peaceful ashram in India!")

Obviously, my own miserable ashram childhood contributed to my detestation of Eat Pray Love. (To be fair, Gilbert’s ashram, which is not mine, sounds well-run and sensible, if you’re into that kind of thing.) So I'm making that disclosure, but honestly, there are many other reasons to detest Eat Pray Love.

But since I cannot type the name of my own memoir without some wistful hope that readers will be inspired to seek it out and purchase ten additional copies to give as gifts to their loved ones, I cannot even disclaim any intention of self-promotion. Given that, all I can do is apologize in advance.

Sorry!

Gilbert is a rich white American writer undergoing a painful divorce when she becomes suicidally depressed, finds God while collapsed in a puddle of tears on her bathroom floor, and obtains a hefty book advance to live abroad for a year and write about it. She decides to explore pleasure in Rome, spirituality in an unnamed Indian ashram (spiritual center), and balance in Bali.

In Rome she eats lots of excellent food and banishes depression with sheer force of will and grace of God. In India she has amazing spiritual experiences via meditation and introspection, including getting zapped by an inner blue light. (The ashram section, unsurprisingly considering that it mostly takes place inside Gilbert’s head as she attempts to empty her mind of thought, is narcissistic and boring.) In Bali she hangs out with two traditional healers, raises money to help one of them buy a house, and finds True Love with a sexy, confident, passionate, loving, sophisticated, and generally perfect Brazilian man who is just like her, only older, male, and did I mention perfect?

I finally forced myself to read this book, which from other people’s recommendations (“She goes to an ashram and has amazing spiritual experiences! You’ll love it!”) I felt sure I’d hate, because I want to get into travel writing and I wanted to see what made this particular travel book a bestseller. The answer, once I finished it (with increasing hatred of the smug, self-absorbed, self-righteous Gilbert), was clear:

1. Wish-fulfillment. Who wouldn’t want to be paid to spend a year abroad, going wherever you want and doing whatever you want? I sure would! Moreover, she gets over her awful divorce, breaks her cycle of bad romantic relationships via True Love, does a substantial good deed, finds spiritual peace and fulfillment, and eats the world’s best pizza. And then comes home and publishes a best-seller.

2. It tells a certain cadre of readers— middle to upper class Americans with vaguely New Agey leanings— exactly what they already believe is true: that enlightenment can be found in India, that personal fulfillment is a profound and meaningful goal, that all things natural and Asian are superior to all things manufactured and Western, that charity is satisfying and worth doing but you have to be kind but firm with your poor Third World recipients or they’ll rip you off, and that if you try hard and navel-gaze and seek spirituality in exotic foreign lands you’ll be rewarded with everything you’ve ever dreamed of, right down to a fairy-tale romance.

3. Gilbert is a pretty good travel writer in the few parts when she’s looking outward rather than inward. Portions of the book are well-written and funny. (Those portions are concentrated in the first third.)

I find it difficult to separate my loathing of the book from my loathing of Gilbert from my memories of people and attitudes I loathed at the ashram where I spent my childhood. Her attitude about antidepressants (“I really needed them, but you peasants who lack my superior contempt of them shouldn’t be allowed to get them as easily as I did”) mirrors an attitude about India that I often got from Westerners at the ashram, and which oozes from every page of Gilbert’s memoir: “I need my Western medicine and appliances and education and opportunities, but you’re actually lucky not to have them because that stuff sucks, really, and anyway you have herbs and yoga which is so much better. Bye-bye! I had a great spiritual experience in your beautiful country which I will treasure forever as I relax in my New York penthouse.”

I’m not saying that herbs and yoga are worthless, or that Westerners should be banned from having spiritual experiences in Asia. It’s the self-centeredness, entitlement, lack of perspective, and lack of empathy for the actual occupants of the country which bothers me.

Gilbert does show kindness and compassion when she raises money to buy a Balinese woman and her family a house. But I wish she’d sat down and had a discussion with the woman about what she wanted, and what she would like Gilbert to do to help—and that, when the deal got rocky, Gilbert had sat down again and discussed both of their concerns instead of bullying the woman for her own good. Openness can go wrong, and high-handed condescension can produce good results. But the latter is not how you deal with people whom you consider your equals.

In short: hated it, hated it, hated it. Hated her. Hated her perfect Brazilian boyfriend. Even hated her guru, and she doesn't even appear in the book except as a perfectly enlightened and compassionate gaze via a photograph. In conclusion: hated it. Buy my book instead!

From that book that I finally got around to reading for research purposes (research question: "Why is this book such a huge bestseller?") and which everyone but me loves to bits, Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love. Context: During a harrowing divorce, Gilbert becomes depressed. She tries endless "natural remedies," but seeks the care of a psychiatrist after she attempts suicide.

I do know these drugs made my misery feel less catastrophic. So I'm grateful for that. But I'm still deeply ambivalent about mood-altering medication. I'm awed by their power, but concerned by their prevalence. I think they need to be prescribed and used with much more restraint in this country, and never without the parallel treatment of psychological counseling. Medicating the symptom of any illness without exploring its root cause is just a classically Western hare-brained way to think that anyone could ever truly get better. Those pills might have saved my life, but they did so only in conjunction with about twenty other efforts I was making simultaneously during the same period to rescue myself, and I hope to never take such drugs again.

There are so many selfish, condescending, and hare-brained statements in that one little paragraph that I need to pull it apart to address each one.

But I'm still deeply ambivalent about mood-altering medication. I'm awed by their power, but concerned by their prevalence. I think they need to be prescribed and used with much more restraint in this country

In the year 2020, approximately 1.53 million people will die from suicide based on current trends and according to WHO estimates. Ten to 20 times more people will attempt suicide worldwide (2). This represents on average one death every 20 seconds and one attempt every 1-2 seconds.

It is, of course, possible for a medication to be over-prescribed in some cases and under-prescribed in others. But considering that, according to WHO, "Suicide is among the 10 leading causes of death for all ages in most of the countries for which information is available. In some countries, it is among the top three causes of death for people aged 15-34 years," I'm going to say that under-prescription is the bigger problem-- a problem which attitudes like Gilbert's foster.

I think they need to be prescribed and used with much more restraint in this country

How callous, priveleged, arrogant, selfish, and smug can you get?! So meds are okay for her, because she had a real problem and didn't take them until she was at the point of suicide and has moral qualms about their use, but all those other ignorant peons who gobble them like candy need to have their access restricted?!

That is one of the most despicable statements and sentiments I've come across in quite some time.

and never without the parallel treatment of psychological counseling.

I agree with that, actually.

ETA: Oops, missed the "never;" I think counseling should always be offered, but should not be mandatory. If nothing else, the experience of having a mental illness for a long period of time will usually give you dysfunctional thinking patterns and ways of relating to people that counseling will help address. But if your problem is being completely addressed by meds and you're doing fine, no, you probably don't need counseling if you don't want it.

Medicating the symptom of any illness without exploring its root cause is just a classically Western hare-brained way to think that anyone could ever truly get better.

1. In many cases of mental illness, the "root cause" is either known as a biological and/or genetic problem and so doesn't really need to be "explored" in the sense of discovering its root cause (like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder) or the patient is so ill that she will not benefit from such exploration until medication has kicked her into a higher-functioning mode.

Also, some forms of talk therapy are specifically about the present and not root causes -- and those forms are statistically more effective for some disorders than classic "root cause" therapy. (ie, cognitive-behavioral therapy vs. psychoanalysis for depression.)

2. What a stupid statement!

"Medicating the symptom of a broken leg by setting it without exploring its root cause is just a classically Western hare-brained way to think that anyone could ever truly get better."

"Medicating the symptom of the bubonic plague with antibiotics without exploring its root cause is just a classically Western hare-brained way to think that anyone could ever truly get better."

"Medicating the symptom of a cataract with surgery without exploring its root cause is just a classically Western hare-brained way to think that anyone could ever truly get better."

3. Gilbert's Asia-philia blinds her to the reality of actual Asian medicine, which is not necessarily as holistic as she thinks. She should read Atul Gawande's Better for an excellent portrayal of actual doctors in India doing brilliant work under extremely difficult conditions.

Those pills might have saved my life, but they did so only in conjunction with about twenty other efforts I was making simultaneously during the same period to rescue myself,

I am absolutely not against doing whatever might help. All the same, the plural of anecdote is not data.

and I hope to never take such drugs again.

Well, I hope you DO!

I can't believe I'm wishing such ill on anyone, whatever sort of scumbag they are... but this book was a huge bestseller, people are influenced by what they read, and so Gilbert's screed may be indirectly responsible for someone committing suicide because they were trying to make sure they waited to use them as long as she did -- and she waited till it was down to her, a knife, and a worried friend. What if some reader doesn't have a worried friend?

What a loathesome and damaging thing to write.

Here is a three-part essay on my experience with depression.

Here is a three-part essay on my experience with post-traumatic stress disorder.

In case that was a large earthquake elsewhere rather than a smallish one (maybe a 5?) nearby... I'm fine. Nothing broken. That was long, though.

ETA: Hmmm. The LA Times server just went down, probably from 9.6 million Angelenos hitting it to find out about the quake. But there's nothing on CNN or Google news. Must not have been that big.

ETA II: 5.8, epicenter near Chino Hills (LA County, not LA City; near Pomona.) No damage or injuries have been reported.

ETA III: Just downgraded to estimated 5.4.

ETA IV: What to do during an earthquake: http://www.fema.gov/hazard/earthquake/eq_during.shtm
If anyone has any questions or quibbles with their recs, I'd be happy to discuss them. There are a lot of myths and outdated recommendations floating around.