The Light At The End Of The Tunnel

On 11.19.08, In Highs & Lows, Medication, By aah

I’ve been taking Lamictal for a little more than a week, now.  Even though I’m still at the lowest dosage as I titrate up… I think (and I say this cautiously) that I’m starting to feel good again.  Not manic.  Not hypomanic.  Not simply not depressed.  But … more like myself.  I’m thinking more clearly.  I’m able to work some simple problems out in my head that I haven’t been able to work out for a couple of years.  And speaking of my head, some of the noise seems to be dying down, and some of the clutter seems to be clearing up.

For the first time in so much longer than I want to admit, I feel hopeful, and more than that, I feel as if hope makes sense and is more than just some sort of throw-it-up-in-the-air-and-see-where-it-lands long shot.

I’ve been thinking that the only thing I’ve really learned in all my years of dealing with this illness is that all things pass.  Now what I’m remembering is that life was better than that for a long, long time.  I believe that it will be again.

I believe that soon, I’ll actually be able to believe in myself and my own capabilities again.

It’s been a long time coming.

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How To Create A WordPress Theme – Part 1

On 11.18.08, In Learning As I Go, By admin

Creating a WordPress theme can seem overwhelming to the casual (or even rusty, speaking for myself) web developer.  It requires PHP, for one thing.  And you have to read a few instructions to get started, for another (something I’ve never been keen on doing).  It would have helped me a lot to find some kind of really simple, really straight-forward documentation somewhere about creating my own theme, and that’s the purpose of this series of posts.  Expect edits and updates as I proceed.

Prerequisites

  1. Basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and PHP
  2. Your own private WordPress installation – preferably something not currently in production use (messing around with your site’s current theme can tick off your user’s – and you’ll want to switch themes often as you work through these steps).Note:  if you don’t have a hosted WordPress installation, let alone a web server or PHP setup on your personal computer, check out MAMP (if you’re a Windows user) or LAMP (if you’re a Mac user).  These are idiot-proof (and free!!) programs that will install Apache (a web server), PHP (a server-side scripting language), and MySQL (a free relational database) for you.  This is the standard setup for a WordPress install.  Then mosey on over to http://www.wordpress.org to get the latest version of WordPress.  Yes, you’ll have to follow the instructions included in the readme.html file – but there are only 2 or 3 of them, and they’re really, really, REALLY easy (they don’t call it the 5 minute install for nothing).
  3. Administrative rights to the wp_content/themes directory, as well as to the WordPress installation itself.
  4. A text file editor.  If you want WYSIWYG, check out any of the many web development software environments (I use Dreamweaver).  But a text file editor is all that’s required.

Step 1 – Create Your Theme

A theme requires at least 2 documents:  a style sheet called ‘style.css’, and a PHP document called ‘index.php’.  We’re going to create the very simplest version of each:

  1. Create a directory under wp_content/themes.  For purposes of this exercise, let’s call it “my_theme” (i.e., wp_content/themes/my_theme).
  2. Create a style sheet.  Don’t worry – you don’t have to put a single style in this document.  What we’re going to do in this first step is simply add a commented heading that WordPress will use to get a little information about your theme, so copy the following in to a new text file and save it as “style.css” in your “my_theme” directory: 
    /*
Theme Name: My Theme
Theme URI: http://mytheme.com
Description: My first WordPress theme.
Version: .01
Author: Me
Author URI: http://mytheme.com
Tags: some tags describing my theme go here

	My Theme

http://myurl.com

	This theme was designed and built by Me.

	The CSS, XHTML and design is released under GPL:

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php

*/
  3. Create an index page.  This is just a text file, saved in your “my_theme” directory as index.php.  The file needs to contain a hook back in to the main WordPress system, and should also display your posts.  We aren’t going to bother with anything else at all in this step – we’re just getting started.  So paste the following in to your index.php text file, and save it: 
    <?php get_header(); //This is the hook back in to WordPress ?>

<?php
//This is The Loop (read more about it out on
//http://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop).
//It uses have_posts, the_post, and the_content (also known as
//'Template Tags') to display the posts in your blog.
    if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();
        the_content();
    endwhile; endif;
?>

Step 4 – Switch To And View Your Theme

Let’s pretend like this is a brand-spanking new WordPress installation, and that you decided to call it “My Blog”.  Have you ever visited your site’s Dashboard?  Well, it’s certainly beyond the scope of this post.  We’re just going to focus on switching to your new theme so you can see what we hath wrought…

  1. Go to your WordPress Dashboard.  If you’re as shiny-new as we’re assuming, you can get there by logging in to your site and then clicking on the ‘Admin’ link in the ‘Meta’ section of your blog’s sidebar.  Or you can just go out to your blog’s wp-admin URL (i.e., http://www.myblog.com/wp_admin).
  2. Click on Design
  3. Click on Themes
  4. Scroll down and look for the theme you just created.  Click on it.  Activate it by clicking on the “Activate” link in the upper right corner.
  5. Click on the ‘Visit Site’ button.
  6. Your browser should display the name of your blog and your posts.  Of course, the number of posts will vary depending on how many (if any) you’ve created.

Summary

In summary, creating your own theme can be as simple – or as complex – as you want it to be.  Check back in for Part II in this series of posts.

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Every day she takes a morning bath she wets her hair

On 11.11.08, In Career, Highs & Lows, By aah

So we’re driving to Arkansas and I’m mostly thinking about how I’m hoping really hard that my sore throat and runny nose are allergies that will pass about the time we hit the Oklahoma state line.  And we’re flying happily past all the detrious that lines America’s interstate highways – the mobile home dealers, the billboards, the junk yards and truck stops and BBQ places out in the middle of nowhere.  We haven’t quite gotten far enough away to hit any real open road when we decide to stop for gas and Cokes at this cool little setup next to a flying saucer (which was for sale, by the way), and that’s about the time I realized that my intuition about this job was fading away.  It was like when my pregnancies faded away.  They were gone, and I only realized later that I’d known it before anybody told me.

Oklahoma has more trees than I thought it would; they got thicker as we got closer to Arkansas, and sunset and then darkness fell as we rolled down highway 69.  We were listening to the election returns on Public Radio, and we commented what a great day we were about to have – a whole new president, a whole new fabulous job, right here in the middle of this devestated economy – solidarity high-five as we roll down the road – too bad I don’t drink anymore, or we could toast this night.

But the allergies held on and by the time we got to Ft Smith I knew I had well and truly gotten a cold.  What little neck I had was swollen enough to brush my collar in an irritating way, my throat was burning from post-nasal drip, I could barely hear, and I spent the remainder of the drive blowing my nose, when I wasn’t sneezing.

I woke up the next morning and put on my carefully-selected interview outfit:  a red blouse, black slacks, brown sling-back pumps.  I worried over my hair and makeup; noted that my eyes matched my blouse exactly, as unfortunately red-rimmed and blood-shot as they were.  Blew my nose a whole bunch in a fruitless attempt to pull all the snot out of my body.

Betonville is smaller than my hometown of Canyon, Texas, but for all intents and purposes it’s really just a big technology park, all humongous, low-slung corporate campuses and chain restaurants, with big-city traffic to go with it (minus the lights and freeways, since there were stop signs planted every few hundred feet).  David dropped me off in front of the David Glass Technology Center.

I worked my way through the interview itinerary, at the end of which a young woman came to collect me and give me the result , which I still expected to be my official job offer.  She couldn’t have been more than 22 or 23 years old, and was wearing the kind of get-up I used to wear to work when I was her age and modeling myself on what career women looked like on television.  I was distracted by her hair, which had been bleached and highlighted in to a perfectly smooth back-combed bob.  This in contrast to my $80 hair-cut that left two long, dry strands dangling in my eyes no matter how often I pushed them away.  I followed her in to what appeared to be a tiny telephone booth.  She closed the door.  Hesitated as she leaned towards me.  And I knew as soon as we ducked in there, really I did.

I felt flushed and speechless with anger and surprise.  It made me afraid to speak.  And then I noticed her eyebrows.  Plucked almost to nothingness, everything near the inner edge of her eye completely gone, just thin little vulnerable lines above child-like eyes, tiny hairs each precisely the same length, something she’d probably worried over the way I’d worried over my own makeup that morning.  She’s so young, I thought, and ached with both envy and a useless sense of understanding that this perfect little thing would probably be afraid of me.  Afraid to break the news.  And she was.  She tried to dodge it.  Her manager walked in.  Clarified things a bit.  They escorted me out.  That was that.

If I had been her age; if I had been 23 and had just been rejected in this way, I would have gotten in to the car and cried, and then I would have raged against her, against her boss, against everybody I met at Wal-Mart.  I wouldn’t have looked back and it wouldn’t have mattered, because my future would have been laid out in front of me like a big, blue sky.  But I’m 42 – old enough to be her mother, I realized with dismay, if I could have any kinds, that is.  And so I didn’t cry.  Didn’t say much at all, actually.  I spent most of the rest of the trip home simply wondering – what was I supposed to have learned from this?  I’d prayed so hard and so often for God to let me have this job; to have gotten so close only to have it snatched away… only to have my ability to support my family, and to live up to the commitments I’ve made… to have them pass me by; there must be something I was supposed to learn from this, a grand lesson. I don’t believe things happen without a reason, but this experience was testing that belief.  Surely there’s more than just punishment for my poor decisions over the past few months, here, I thought, but I couldn’t figure out what.

We drove home in the dark, after we left McAllester.  We didn’t talk much.  I knew David had been thinking that it was about to be his turn to take time off work; that he’d been right to bet on me, after all, and that everything was going to be allright.  And I knew his thoughts had all turned dark, as if I’d shut off all the lights.  We were going back to exactly where we were when we left:  my PhD husband at his hourly tech support job and his wife; you know, the one who blew her career on booze and self-indulgence, the one who fixates on her physical maladies, the one who gained 40 pounds almost as soon as he married her – the same wife who has no sex drive and spends her evenings in the kitchen, taking pills and puffs off her inhaler, in between bites of her latest, sugary snack.

Since I got home I’ve believed wholeheartedly that there are no jobs out there for me.  When I think back through my career it all seems like something only a youngster could do:  that I stumbled my way in to jobs I wasn’t qualified for based on my youth and charm until I landed in the one position in the world that required all the experience I’d gained in doing that.  A job that was given to someone else before I even left the company; a company I left with technical skills that are now 10 years out of date.  Now I’m just an overweight middle-aged woman with soft skills and poor judgement and red eyes who looks uncomfortable in her ill-fitting, polyester interview clothes.

I had a boss when I was 23 who told me I was in the top 10% of the top 10% in the world because I was a young, attractive, witty, intelligent, white American woman.   When I worked at IBM I was in the top 2% in the world because of my salary.  The world has changed, and so have I.  I just wish someone could tell me what percentile I am in, now.  It might make it easier to look for a job.

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Why Don't You Just Get A Job?

On 11.11.08, In Career, Reflections, By aah

Ok, this is a record for me in many ways.  ‘This’ being my unemployment, I mean.  Until May 5 of this year, the longest I’d gone without working was about 6 weeks in the summer of ’99 – and that terrified me, back then.  However, at the end of that 6 weeks I had 4 lucrative job offers on the table to choose from.  Now, I’ve been unemployed for 6 months and 6 days and I’ve got nada.  No wonder people don’t like the number 6.

Not that there haven’t been any opportunities:  I worked at Dell as a contractor for a few weeks, then quit.  And I did get offered that job in Portland for a lot of money, but David didn’t want to move there.  But that’s it, man.  I’m like an old magnetic screw driver that’s lost it’s magnatism.  Nothing’s coming to me.

Money worries (though that seems like such a mild word for what we have right now) aside, that’s kind of ok with me, and I’ll try to explain why in this post.

Last week, we drove to Bentonville, Arkanasas for my big job interview with Wal-Mart’s ISD group.  The job:  project manager.  The pay:  $93.5K a year plus an annual 30% bonus plus an annual assignment of preferred stock plus matching 401K plus full relocation.  Before I left, the recruiter told me I had the job, and the itenerary their HR department sent me seemed to indicate the same thing:  two hours of interviews followed by a ‘meet & greet’ followed by lunch followed by an hour talking about Wal-Mart’s benefits plan.

I completed the itenerary.  Everything seemed to go very well.  They decided to pass.

So I climbed back in the car with David and we drove home.  But on the way, since we were passing through, we decided to go see David’s brother at the radio station he owns in McAllester, Oklahoma.  To say I didn’t want to stop would be an understatement.  I was throbbing with rejection and dissapointment.  But we did stop, and as we took the grand tour of the station, here’s what I saw:

Picture an old, old little low-roofed building that rambles on and on.  Out front, several large, painted wooden signs are attached to the roof declaring the various stations (rock, country, etc.) the station broadcasts.  Inside, a maze of tiny rooms, some lined in old shag carpeting (floor to ceiling), filled with radio equipment.  The ceiling tiles are caving in, in a couple of the rooms, dirty insulation dangling overhead. Most rooms have somebody in them.  Some individual person, hanging out, waiting for a song to finish so they can do the news, for instance.  The people are all grizzled-looking:  fat, old, no makeup here.  They wear old, comfortable, worn-out clothes.  I wondered how much money they make – surely, not much.  Most of them have been there for decades.  Bob himself has been with the station for 22 years – he and his wife (who’s worked there for 23 years) just went in to partnership with some folks and bought it year before last. The kicker?  Everyone I saw looked happy; an air of contentment swam through every little room in the building.

We finished the tour, then headed to Bob’s house.  They built it two years ago.  It’s a rich person’s house, all wood floors and soaring celings; granite counters in a kitchen the size of our living room, a Wolf range and a golf cart they keep parked next to the garage for their granddaughter to use when she visits.  The house is perched on a cliff, and looks out over the rolling, ranging, wooded hills of Oklahoma.

And oh how I envied Bob and Sheila, for just awhile.  Envied them their financial security, and their house on a cliff, and their Wolf range.  Envied them their cute and cuddly and perfectly cleaned and groomed little dog that likes to snuggle and kiss.  Envied them the pristine cleanliness of their house.

It was only much, much later that I realized I also envied the people in the radio station.  I remember people like that from when I was a teenager up in Canyon.  Their life and their work simply seem to fit them, like their clothes.  They seem comfortable with whatever worries they may have.  Comfortable with what they don’t have.  Happy in their work.

Now that I’ve had a few days for my emotions to calm down about the Wal-Mart job (and I just have to throw in here that I think that’s the only job I ever interviewed for – and there have been a LOT in my life – that I wasn’t offered), I’ve discovered a sense of relief.  Relief about not having a reason to leave Austin, which I’ve hugged to me like a pillow since we got back home.  And relief at having a reason to look for a totally different kind of job, and even life.  A job out of the corporate IT world, if at all possible.  Even if that means doing data entry for the IRS on a night shift, and working part-time at Home Depot as a stocker or cashier as well.  There are all kinds of things I can do to earn money, if I can find somebody to hire me.  Things that don’t require that I work in a facility so large that I have to walk 1.8 miles under the same, flouescent lighting and grey ceiling tiles and blue carpet in uncomforable clothes just to get to the cafeteria and back (the end of the meet & greet part of the Wal-Mart itenerary, the distance announced by our tour guide).

The main thing is to get busy.

FYI here that I saw Dr. Okayli yesterday.  Now that I’m not drinking it’s much easier to make a diagnosis:  Bipolar I.  Not a surprise, but a relief.  I started back on Lamictal last night.

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Flip Flops

On 11.10.08, In Reflections, By aah

Reading through my old diary entries as I post them to this new blog has been enlightening, to say the least.  Over the past couple of years (or longer) I’ve asked myself – what’s caused this slow decline into unemployment and perpetual insecurity?  Was it the IVF?  Was it the way I took my medications?  What it a specific medication?  Was it that I was taking medications at all – or was it what I wasn’t taking?  Was it the alcohol, or was it even just simple psychology?

I guess I’ll never really know the answer to the question.  The truth of the matter is that, even as I search for other answers, I believe the problem lies in the choices I make day by day.  You can see it early in my IVF diary entries – the choice to continue the smoke and drink while trying to get pregnant; you can see it in my entires about my marriage and my parents – the latent anger and unhappiness, and my urgent need to cover it up or ignore it instead of dealing with it.  The guilt, written all over everything, about wanting my own life on my own terms.

I haven’t taken a real mood stabilizer all year, and here we are in November.  I’ve taken small doses of Seroquel to help me sleep.  I’ve taken Neurontin – particularly since I quit drinking – because it quiets the unnamable discomfort I feel inside that’s driven me to drink for so many years (in fact, it does a much better job of it than alcohol ever did).  And last Tuesday marked 8 full weeks of sobriety for me.  8 weeks doesn’t sound like a long time.  Two months.  But it is.  It’s enough time to take measure of who I am without drinking.

There’s been something queer and surprising to me about my sobriety.  There have been a few times I’ve actually come close to taking a drink.  Planned, in a thoughtless kind of way, to go to a beer garden and have a beer, or to Trudy’s and have a margarita… or to take advantage of the endless supply of champagne at a wedding.  Each time I’ve really believed I would drink.  Each time, I chose not to.  For once in my life I’ve quit a habit, and the thought of what it was like when I was doing the habit is enough to keep me away from it.  I know that if I take a drink, it won’t end there.  It will never feel like enough – not really; oh, maybe for an evening it’ll seem like enough, but the next day, the craving will be back.  Not so strongly that I couldn’t deny it on a good day.  But I haven’t had any good days like that in years.  I think it might be years before I take another drink.  Or it might not.  Because I do want to think I’ll be able to drink socially again some day.  But it’s been 8 weeks of not having a single day when I believed that I could.

With my sobriety comes a wish that I could have done this months before I ever tried IVF.  I thought of drinking the way I thought of my closest friends, at the time.  And, frankly, I did not believe I could maintain my life in any direction without the relief of drinking.  Without the promise of a drink at the end of the day, or at the end of the week, or tomorrow night, or this afternoon… or whenever.  Drinking was my reward for the latent unhappiness I mentioned above.

The truth is that alcohol didn’t help me cope with anything, but I couldn’t have known that back then.  In fact, it didn’t make any difference at all.  It made me fatter, I’m sure.  And I’m certain it impacted my judgment and my work performance and many other aspects of my life.  But it never changed anything.

Back in early August, when I first told David I needed help, he didn’t quite believe me.  He didn’t understand that I was going through a 750ml bottle of tequila in two days – and that there was only enough left on the 2nd day for a couple of drinks.  He didn’t understand that I was mixing it up — beer at home, margaritas with dinner, wine before bed.  He didn’t think the fact that I was filling up our 13-gallon recycling trash can with bottles every week – was, in fact, overflowing it – meant anything suspicious.

Many people say what drove them to get help for problems with drugs or alcohol are friends and family.  Mine didn’t see the problem the way I did.

Unfortunately, it was only one problem, and it didn’t solve the others.  I’m still having major problems interacting with other people. I still don’t have a job.  I was, in fact, turned down for a position in Arkansas when I interviewed in person – a position I was told was “in the bag”, and that was after I’d sat through an hour’s explanation of the company’s benefits.  I am out of tune, and I know it.  Quitting drinking didn’t solve that problem – and drinking didn’t, either.  I’m swinging back and forth between hypomania and depression every 2 or 3 weeks.  I have completely and utterly lost any sex drive.  I can still masturbate, but I only do it every week or so.  It relieves tension when I’m hypomanic.  I can’t even remember what sexual desire felt like.  Not with anyone in the past, not for anyone other than my husband, and not for my husband, either.

Sometimes my symptoms are more serious than others.  For instance, after I was turned down for the job in Arkansas, and as David and I were driving down the highway headed back to Austin, I wondered – really wondered – if I should just kill myself.  I shut that thinking down pretty quickly, but I have asked myself that question more often, the past several months, than I have in years.  And my intrusive thoughts are back.  They’re at their worst towards the end of each hypomanic phase.  I’m not getting to bed until 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning, and I feel sort of jazzed about that.

And most of all is the fact that I can tell – I know it, as I know my own face in the mirror – that I am living in a bit of a fantasy.  We’re almost out of money.  My $40K pension and 401K is nearly gone.  We have enough to get by until the end of the year if we use every last penny to do it.  And then we’ll owe enourmous taxes on our withdrawals.

I never intended for my time away from work to be like this.  I thought I’d go through a healthy/self-improvement phase and end up right back at work somewhere.  And that’s almost what happened.  I was offered a contract position with Dell 6 weeks after I left IBM, and I accepted it.  When I left Dell, I knew something was very wrong.  Very, very wrong.

I see Dr Okayli tomorrow, and I’m going to ask her to put me back on Lamictal.  Maybe raise my Seroquel to a theraputic level so it actually acts as an antipsychotic.  Maybe prescribe something else to help counteract the weight gain I know will happen.

I feel so sad about falling in to this state.  It’s both familiar and foreign territory.  Things have morphed a bit as I’ve grown older.  I do a much better job of holding things in.  I recognize some monsters for what they are.  But those things don’t make the monsters go away, or the fear, the paranoia, the hypomania, the fixations, the depression, the tendency to say slightly inappropriate things at odd times.

And I want so much to go back to work.  God help us both, I’m so sorry I didn’t get the job with Walmart, but I would have been miserable there.  I love Austin.  I love our house.  And I hate project management.  I want to be a web developer and stay here in Austin in our house.  I want a job where I’m more junior than senior.  Where I’m a sophomore.  Where I can talk tech with my peers, and where it’s good to wear blue jeans and flip flops to work.  That would be great, but at this point I’m really wondering if I should be applying at Home Depot or somewhere as a cashier, even if just for the holidays.  We need income now.   Right now.

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