Nathen's Miraculous Escape

October 20, 2013

42nd Year Retrospective

Posted by Nathen under Abandon Ship, aging, Benjamin Lester, Camp Latgawa, Candy Crush, Christina, Couples and Family Therapy, Damian Lester, Darlene Lester, death, desert living, Ely Lester, Ethan Mitchell, family, food, Gabriel, goals/intentions, heart rate training, Joshua Tree, learning curves, marriage, Maya, Morongo Basin Mental Health, NBTSC advisee groups, neurosequential therapeutics, Not Back to School Camp, Oliver Lee, Pacific Clinics, paleo diet, photography, Reanna, San Bernardino County, self-care, Steve Lester, therapy, Tilke Elkins, Transition Joshua Tree, work
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This is a long post, so first the short version. In the last year: I started working full time and am adjusting to that. I’m glad to be working towards my MFT licensure, but uncomfortable about how it pushes my relationships and other projects onto the back burner. My marriage gets better and better, despite this. The company I work for goes out of business so I get part of the summer off, and I get the exact same job (family therapist for US Marines & their families) with a new company.

And for the year ahead: I plan to continue this work, taking good care of myself, dance with Reanna every night, as promised to my friend, Tilke, in her “How to be a Real Artist” workshop, get in best shape in 5 years, and learn how to treat myself and Reanna really really well while working full time.

October: I started my year out at Farm & Wilderness, VT, staffing and teaching a really fun psychology project at Not Back to School Camp. As is traditional, I got really sick, but this time it was from a waitress in Rutland, not someone at NBTSC. I recuperated while visiting Ethan & Susannah, also in Vermont. Back in Joshua Tree, I started working out again (SERIOUS style), planted my first winter garden, fixed some electrical and plumbing problems in my trailer, and started setting up a private practice. In the process of hiring a supervisor, I found out that in California, unlike in Oregon, I cannot do my internship in a private practice. So I started looking for work in a local clinic.

Looking out over Woodward Reservoir from my cabin at Farm & Wilderness

Ethan, cataloging NBTSC lost & found in his library

The famous Quodlibetarian tub

Reanna

Reanna at Playa Del Rey

Ollie, a year ago

Ollie & Pap

Gabe, Damian & Maya on the Hwy 62 Art Tour

Trailer at sunset, looking south

November: I move into a new computer, archive my years of audio journal entries, and learn Sketchup while applying for and getting a job at Morongo Basin Mental Health: providing free, confidential therapy for US Marines, veterans, and their families. In what would become a series of small-town coincidences, a high school friend I hadn’t seen in decades worked there, saw my name on the interview list and sat in on my interview, interjecting stuff like, “Oh, yeah, good answer!” Nice way to interview. The manager of the military program assured me that the our contract was solid for at least two years. That’s about how long I need to get my hours for licensure, so the job sounded good–no chance of having to ditch my clients like I had to in grad school! I spent the rest of the month getting in as much time with Reanna and my family before starting full time work.

Rainbow over the Bartlet Mts

Maya & Ollie in hammock

Ollie helps Nana Honey cook

Me & Reanna

December: My 93 year old Grandpa Bob gets really sick, and I get really sick taking care of him. I was pretty sure he was going to die. He had pneumonia and had to go on antibiotics for the first time in his life. It took me weeks to fully recover. He eventually recovered, too, but I’m not sure he’ll ever fully recover. He’s been on antibiotics off and on ever since and is progressively less mobile. It’s got me thinking a lot about dying–how I can support the people I love when they start having a hard time taking care of themselves, and how I want to die when my time comes.

I start at MBMH, reading 40 hours a week of protocols. I have Christmas with family in Joshua Tree. My brother Damian starts a weekly evening with family, listening to an integral Christianity lecture and meditation that turns out to be a presentation of integral theory to Christians, rather than Christianity to integral thinkers, but valuable nonetheless.

Reanna & Christina, Xmas

Reanna & Maya, Xmas

Ely, Christina, Pap, Ben, Rebeca, Xmas

Gabe, Ely, Ollie, Christina, Xmas

Reanna, ukulele, heater

Ollie, bundled up

January: I get my first paid vacation ever–one week off, fully paid by MBMH. Weird, pretty nice. I write my first attempt at a comprehensive political statement. Reanna and I start a three-month experiment with a strict “paleo” diet, which mostly means we cut out sugar and grains from our diet. The theory is that human adaptation to grains and refined anything is shallow at best. I also start cooking Mexican food (the paleo-friendly recipes) from Rick Bayless’ Authentic Mexican. I love it. And Reanna loves eating it. I start learning to play Reanna’s ukulele. I play and sing “Amazing Grace” most nights for a month. Fun!

I’m working full time, which I’ve never done. It’s not my favorite schedule. I had to let go of most of my projects. I started building a solar batch water heater in the fall, for example, that is still not finished. The schedule has simplified my life quite a bit. Work all day, spend the evening with Reanna. I gained more respect for my friends who’ve been working full time for decades and still manage to write some music or read books. I’m ramping into a caseload, though, and am seeing seven clients a week by the end of the month.

My endurance training is going great by this point. Mid month I got my heart rate up to 179 bpm without hurting myself. Very exciting.

Smiley and Gallant visit

Reanna in our clean, cold kitchen

Dinner’s almost ready. (Photo by Reanna.)

Grandpa Bob turns 94

Me in therapist costume, with Ollie. (Photo by Reanna.)

February: Full time work continues. I get trained in the Trauma Resiliency Model, which I find very cool and useful. I re-up the trademark on Abandon Ship. I feel sad that I can’t write music with my brothers right now, but have plenty of optimistic plans to do so… Reanna starts designing our future house, another exciting project that I have to watch from the sidelines. I love watching her get super deep into a topic like this, though. She is now the resident expert in passive-solar-optimized-very-small-house design. We start car shopping, too. We need to be independently mobile in Joshua Tree.

Trench. Hose feeding trailer finally to be buried.

Reanna & treehouse near the Mexican border

Ollie, Damian

March: I’m up to 16 clients at MBMH and I’m fighting for mastery of the intense paperwork load. The clinical work is going great. My supervisor is good, I am fully engaged by my clients, and I get to see a good variety of folks–kids, adults, families, couples. The paperwork is fairly unpleasant, though. Mental health providers that get government funding spend a huge amount of time and energy creating and maintaining a paper trail for their work. These clinics get paid based on the work they claim to have done and then various agencies can audit their files and take that money back if a box wasn’t checked or a T wasn’t crossed. I spend my first very late day at work in March, trying to catch up on paperwork. Reanna is not happy.

Highlights: A great lecture by Bruce Perry, planting my first spring/summer garden, endurance training going great (I work out during my lunches at MBMH), meeting the Transition Joshua Tree folks. And Reanna. Reanna is wonderful.

Lowlights: My truck fails smog and I begin what becomes an expensive debacle trying to get it to pass. I start having sync problems with my Mac that I am still dealing with as I write. I start working on our taxes on weekends. Reanna is Canadian and that makes our taxes super complicated and somehow even though we hired a professional we ended up owing big fines.

Abandon Ship cover art, for the TM folks. Art by Tilke.

Damian & Ollie in old billy goat pen, future garden

Me, just having sunk the garden beds. (Photo by Reanna)

Reanna planting pepper starts

Ollie

Ollie & Reanna take the trash out

Ollie & Reanna rest in the hammock

April: I find out that Morongo Basin Mental Health has decided to go out of business after more than 40 years, at the end of June. That’s quite a shock and less for me than for the many decade-plus employees I work with. At home, our three months of paleo is up and I feel fine, as I have on just about every diet I’ve tried, but it clearly had not solved any of the problems we’d been tracking for the experiment. And I am sick in bed for a week for a third time this year. Reanna’s parents arrive for a month long visit. I don’t get to see them as much as I’d like, but we get in some fun events (like the Morongo Basin Conservation Association’s “Desertwise Landscape Tour” and Transition Joshua Tree’s Water Catchment Workshop), good talks, good swimming. I get trained in sand-tray therapy by my supervisor, Richard Gray, which I find quite useful.

Reanna preps cholla buds for dinner

Family dinner at Damian & Maya’s (Damian with Bugzooka)

Doug & Kathryn up San Jacinto

May: We get a great little car, a gift from Reanna’s parents. It gets 38 mpg unless we use the AC. At work, emotions are high and rumors are flying around. I try to avoid it as much as possible. My coworkers are mostly looking for work with great intensity. I decide that I will chill instead, concentrate on my clients, and do what I can to get my job back with whatever company picks up the military contract in the summer. Meanwhile, something is eating my garden. My weekends and after work time is often spent critter-proofing.

The highlight of the month by far is meeting my new nephew, Julian.

Julian in sling

Ollie in work gloves

First scorpion of a scorpion-rich year

June: I’m at 21 clients at the beginning of my last month at MBMH. The management has had me continue taking new clients but I’m starting to get nervous about it. It’s starting to look like my clients will have a significant lapse in services, and it pisses me off. I write people in charge at the county and local journalists but no-one can say how long it will take to get the military program back up and running. I know I’m fine. I can look forward to a full season working at NBTSC if things go badly. It sucks, though, that my clients are just getting dumped. It’s screwed up. I just have to set them up as best I can for the lapse and do the tons of paperwork to close their charts. Meanwhile, my co-worker, Jackie, introduces me to Candy Crush, which starts sucking up the cracks in my schedule.

Highlights: Jonathan & Ayako’s wedding in Idaho. Motorcycle safety class with Reanna. And being married to Reanna, of course.

Living room pano: Ely, Christina, Julian, Ben, Rebeca visit

Ben & Julian

North end pano from on top of Reanna’s sewing RV

Ayako & Jonathan, getting married

July: I’m unemployed again, but within two weeks I get interviewed by Pacific Clinics, the company who got the military contract that I’d been working for at MBMH. It looks like I’ll get the job based on the reputation I’d made for myself in that position. That feels good! It means I’ll miss most of NBTSC this year, too, for the first time in 14 years.

Reanna leaves for OR to do prep work for NBTSC and I delete Candy Crush from my phone so I can get some things done: install AC in our trailer, create an outside pantry, build a greywater cistern, make a front step for the trailer, get my motorcycle license, and a few other things. Satisfying. Then I fly up to OR to work the Camp Latgawa session of NBTSC.

Reanna hangs our laundry while I goof off with the camera

Cistern in progress

Julian & me

August: Finish at NBTSC (wonderful, as usual), and spend a few short days in Eugene at an NBTSC leadership summit, then back to Joshua Tree for my last week of unemployment. I completed some last-minute landscaping and plumbing projects, built a dry toilet and installed a weather station, then started training at Pacific Clinics in Arcadia.

At the end of August, Reanna got back from her travels, and we started shutting down all lights and electronics at 8pm and just hanging out until going to bed. This was lovely. We usually laid in the hammock outside, talking and looking at stars. The desert summer evenings are really, really nice. Especially with Reanna.

My advisee group, NBTSC Camp Latgawa

Ely & Julian before dinner

Reanna & Ollie, downtown Joshua Tree

September: I start making contact with clients and by the end of the month I’m back up to 7 clients. This is exciting, and it’s nice to be working with some of my old co-workers from MBMH, and the new crew at Pacific Clinics is an entertaining bunch. Working full time again limits what I can do in terms of projects, but I manage to put a new roof on the old goat pen/the new outside pantry, go visit Quail Springs permaculture farm, and start building a new composter with my 2-year-old nephew, Ollie.

At the end of the month, I have my first birthday at home in many years. Usually I’m at camp. It’s nice. My family threw me a little party and I’m glad to be here, even though I miss my people at Farm & Wilderness.

Yes, Ollie wants to help build the composter!

Rain Event, 29 Palms

With Reanna & ocotillo, on my 42nd birthday.

September 14, 2013

Post Rain-Event Seedlings in North Joshua Tree: Little Help From my Botany Friends?

Posted by Nathen under Joshua Tree, photography, plants, rain
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We just had a big rain in Joshua Tree–over an inch in a short period of time. After a rain like that, within hours, tiny plants start sprouting in what had been bare sand for a year. It may be because I haven’t paid close enough attention, or it may be because different seeds sprout after different kinds of rain events, but these plants are unfamiliar to me. I don’t know what they are called or even if I’ve seen them before.

This is about 4″ tall, the biggest I’ve seen so far.

This grows really fast. It’s about a foot wide.

This is maybe 1.5 inches across and appeared late–maybe a week after the rain.

This is less than an inch tall. It first looked like a miniature succulent, then a miniature cactus. Something is eating them down to a nub at a quick pace. It was one of the first to appear: http://instagram.com/p/dxmcnNF6TW/

This makes a low ground cover over maybe 10 square feet. It’s maybe 3/4 of an inch tall.

This came up late, too. The big ones are about an inch tall so far.

I just noticed this one today. The ring is about 4″ across.

I don’t think this one is a mystery. We call it ragweed and it shoots up anywhere the ground has been disturbed, like roadsides and scraped lots. This plant was about a foot tall but I’ve seen many of them waist-high.

September 11, 2013

Walsh’s Eight Major Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes for Mental Health

Posted by Nathen under exercise, food, fun, happiness, meditation, nature, relationships, relaxation, religion, Roger Walsh, spirituality, therapists, volunteering, well-being
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In 2011, Roger Walsh published a review of the research into ways we can improve our mental health and resiliency by changing how we live. He found eight that had both solid research behind them and strong effects. As therapeutic interventions go, these lifestyle changes tend to be enjoyable, inexpensive, and carry only positive side effects such as increased physical health, self-efficacy, and longevity. Despite that, mental health professionals do not emphasize lifestyle changes. This could be due to a spin on the instrument fallacy: Clients bring in a nail and all therapists can think of to use is their hammer. Walsh suggests this failing is because therapists have unhealthy lifestyles themselves.

Exercise: 30 minutes or more of exercise has therapeutic and preventative emotional and cognitive effects.
Nutrition & Diet: Fish, vegetables and fruit in the diet have both enhancing and protective psychological effects.
Time in Nature offers cognitive and emotional benefits and stress relief.
Good relationships: Being connected in rich relationships comes with cognitive benefits, happiness, and resiliency. In fact, the quality of a therapeutic relationship may account for a large part of the benefit of therapy.
Recreation & Enjoyable Activities (AKA fun): Helps with stress, mood, and well-being.
Relaxation & Stress Management: Mindfulness practices and muscle relaxation techniques can have strong and lasting positive effects on mood management.
Religious & Spiritual Involvement is associated with good mental health, maybe especially with faiths centered on love and forgiveness.
Contribution & Service: Giving time and energy to others boosts happiness, as long as it isn’t out of a sense of obligation.

September 7, 2013

Goodbye, Joyful

Posted by Nathen under goodbyes, Grandpa Bob
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I just watched Grandpa Bob receive the news of another of his friends dying. He met Joyful (then Nancy Joy) in the early days of LSD and then MDMA experimentation and they developed what he described as his life’s most emotionally open relationship. They lived together off and on for decades. Grandpa Bob says that she had an almost magical way of recognizing exciting opportunities and making things happen, as well as smoothing over tense situations.

I hung out with Joyful on Maui during the year 2000. Joyful was her legal name. She showed me a credit card, which said “Joyful Joyful.” She said, “They told me I had to have a last name.” I’m not a big fan of hippy names, but hers really seemed to fit. She was joyful, and not in that stuck, chronically cheerful way. She also seemed to collect the most interesting people into her circle, always lived in a supremely beautiful space, and was easy and fun to be around. She moved fairly often and seemed to be able to effortlessly recreate that feeling wherever she went.

Grandpa Bob is 95 and by that age almost everyone you have been close friends with has died. All of his high school friends, everyone he knew from the Air Force and WWII, teachers, students, business partners, girlfriends, everyone except his family and his old friend Rollie, who’s 96 and lives down the street.

Knowing that, it was interesting to watch him get the news. He actually brightened up and reminisced for a while, looking relaxed and pleased, about how great she had been and how much he liked her. He said, “Well, she had a wonderful life. I can’t be sad about that.”

Goodbye, Joyful, and thanks for keeping my Grandpa Bob such good company.

September 2, 2013

Rain Event in Yucca Valley

Posted by Nathen under desert living, photography, rain, video, water, Yucca Valley
[7] Comments

I work at the Monterey Business Center in Yucca Valley, California, which is about 250,000 square feet of flat roofs and cement parking lot. I’d been wondering what all that would look like in a rain event and on August 29, 2013 I found out.

Monterey Business Center arial from Google Maps

Jackie is not as excited about the rain as I am.

Roof water pours onto the sidewalk and into the parking lot

The parking lots have channels to direct water to the street

Onto the street

Down the street

Off the end of the street

Into a gully. (The blue-topped pipe in the gully says “water” on it. I thought that was hilarious.)

Down the gully

Flash flood in Yucca Valley on Make A Gif

And through the desert

Until it hits the berm of a road

Until it breaks through onto the road

And starts to flow down the road

This is where it ran out of steam. The water puddled up here and then mostly evaporated, “To rain again on someone else, east of us,” as Buck from Transition JT says. If there had been more water, it would have poured down this road and into a slightly more intentional gully at the end of it:

It would eventually hit the big wash in front of those mountains in the distance and flow east to the dry lake bed that is just west of Copper Mountain, maybe 18 miles away. That’s the lowest point in our watershed.

Copper Mountain, Sunfair lake bed in front.

[animated gifs made at MakeAGif]

August 16, 2013

Panoramas From NBTSC Latgawa 2013

Posted by Nathen under Camp Latgawa, Not Back to School Camp, panoramas, photography
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I have an app called Photosynth that stitches photos into panoramas. It’s fast enough that you can get decent shots of crowds of people, which I like. The resolution isn’t great, and if the light varies a lot you can lose the brightest details, but I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. Here are some panoramas from Not Back to School Camp Latgawa 2013:

Staff at the swimming hole the day before camp

Welcome circle

First meeting

Outside meeting

Hike to the haunted cabin

Meal-time circle

Campers at the swimming hole

Tilke’s madrone tree art

Crowd in front of Uncle Joe’s

Prom

Post-camp staff meeting. Yes, we are tired.

August 12, 2013

How Dangerous Do We Think We Are?

Posted by Nathen under Americans, Canadians, danger, incarceration rates, prison, statistics
[2] Comments

I’ve been enjoying how incarceration rates, politics, and alternatives are dominating the news today. I don’t follow this conversation closely so it’s been good to see some numbers and hear the different perspectives.

When I first started listening, last night, I heard the numbers presented as totals on CNN, like this list from the International Centre for Prison Studies:

1	United States of America	2,239,751
2	China	1,640,000
3	Russian Federation	686,200

That probably shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. But, I thought, the real question is how dangerous do we think we are compared to other countries. Or, perhaps, how evil do we think we are…

So I looked up the incarceration rates per capita, which, to be fair to the media, is how almost everyone is displaying the data. Here are the same countries (Plus Canada. My wife is Canadian so I like to make comparisons between the US and Canada.) picked out of a chart on Wikipedia:

Rank	Country (or dependent territory)	Prisoners per 100,000 population
1	United States	716
8	Russia	484
124	China	121 or 170^[2]
133	Canada	114

Apparently, here in the land of the free, we consider each other somewhere between 4 and 6 times as dangerous as they do in that repressive regime, China. And well over 6 times as dangerous as Canadians consider themselves. What do you think, Canadians? Are you 1/6 as dangerous as we are?

July 21, 2013

Why It’s Good to Have a Dad When You’re Building a Solar Batch Water Heater

Posted by Nathen under fathers, photography, solar energy
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Dads really come in handy. Maybe especially my dad.

I’m building a solar batch water heater for my trailer. Where did I get that idea? My dad. He’s built two:

One for the house

And one for the bathhouse

Where did I get the tank? My dad. He saves stuff that he finds which just might be useful someday. This habit has its pros and cons, of course, but I’d put him just on this side of the line between saver and hoarder. He heard I wanted to build a solar batch water heater and had “just the thing,” pulled out of an old water heater or something.

Tank

The design, of course, is mostly my dad’s with a few of my own (primarily the over-engineering) and the internet’s (black, not reflective, box).

The white and grey are just primer. The inside will be black and the outside will be a color of Reanna’s choosing.

The major stumbling block so far has been pulling the square-head plugs out of the tank. My wrenches were just rounding the corners. I’d been scouring the internet for a week for a 15/16″ square offset wrench, my best guess for solving the problem, but apparently which you just can’t get anymore. The solution? Ask my dad. “You need a big pipe wrench. I’ve got one in the bottom drawer of my tool box.” He not only had the wrench, but knew how to use it, and the plug was out in a minute or two.

Dad with pipe wrench

My dad is a commercial photographer, sound engineer, and musician. Where did he learn plumbing? I don’t know, but he did say that he got that pipe wrench from his own dad in the 60s.

July 18, 2013

I Need Some Help With This

Posted by Nathen under bruxism, requests
[5] Comments

I grind my teeth at night. Hard. My dentist’s eyes go wide when he sees the marks I make on my bite guard. I probably won’t crack any teeth in the next few weeks, but I will over the next couple decades, and I plan to live for 50-60 more years. I need help.

Dentists don’t know how to stop sleep bruxism. The best they’ve got are these devices that focus the grind onto your front teeth so that you can’t grind as hard. I’ve been told that this would train me to stop grinding but it did not.

The various other treatments have little to no backing research or apparent success: CBT, benzos, other drugs, hypnotherapy, biofeedback, Botox injections.

Have you overcome nighttime tooth grinding or do you know anyone who has? Please let me know how. You can email me at nathensmiraculousescape@gmail.com. Thanks!

July 16, 2013

Goodbye, Candy Crush

Posted by Nathen under addiction, Candy Crush, fun, resilience, Tim Burns, video games
[3] Comments

I deleted the only video game I’ve ever owned late Sunday night. It had to be done.

This is my third version of an essay about the game. The first was called “The Problem With Candy Crush,” and went something like this:

I’m not a video game guy and never have been. I dabbled in Tetris and played some two player games with friends and family, mostly Mortal Kombat and Mario Kart. Perhaps it’s my age–I’m solid Atari-wave Gen-X, the last generational cohort to have a real choice about playing video games. Perhaps I was just always more interested in other stuff. I’d rather read, play guitar, hike, whatever.

A couple of weeks ago, a coworker introduced me to Candy Crush, a single-player game where you try to line up images of candy into groups of three or more, which makes them disappear and more candy pours in from the top. It looks like this:

It sounds boring, and it should be, but I found I wanted to keep playing it. It has this Goldilocks just-hard-enough thing, and the rules are not completely handed to you, in an appealing way. In a short period of depression following a company-wide layoff, I downloaded the game to my iPod and started playing it. It engaged me when nothing else seemed interesting. A few days later, I accidentally played it for an hour and a half, losing my chance to get something done I’d decided to do. I felt cheated. I felt guilty. I felt ashamed. I started this essay in my head.

Candy Crush is a combination of almost completely useless but also very sticky for me in the addiction-theory sense; I want to and do play it all the time but get almost nothing out of it. There are elements of pattern recognition and strategy but of very limited generalizability. There is no social component except for bragging to or begging from friends on facebook. Not only that, but the shapes, motion and patterns of the game show up persistently in my imagination when I’d rather they didn’t: talking with Reanna, meditating, trying to sleep. And dreams–when my friend Zen posted this image, I was certain I’d dreamed this exact scenario:

It got into my head the way speedcubing did for the first several months. The differences are that cubing skills are more generalizable–memorization, dexterity, three-dimensional pattern recognition and tracking– and that I’m genuinely proud of and happy with my moderate Rubik’s-cubing skills. My average one-minute cube solve has a “wow” factor that saying or showing someone that I’m working on Candy Crush level 50 just does not have.

That was how “The Problem With Candy Crush” was going when I attended a lecture at the Southern Region Student Wellness Conference by Tim Burns, entitled, “Fostering Wellbeing and Resiliency.” Apparently, there is some correlation between resiliency and the percentage of the day people say they are having fun, with some kind of threshold at 40%. I haven’t looked into that research, but it really made me think. It wasn’t really that I estimated myself having fun somewhat less than 40% of the time. It was that I was in the middle of this essay about how Candy Crush was stupid and compelling and I hadn’t put my finger on why: It is really, really fun. And I value fun. I value it for its own sake, not just for some theoretical correlation with resiliency.

That’s when I started writing an essay in my head entitled, “The Problem With the Problem With Candy Crush: Fun.”

But a few days later, I deleted the game. I had just dropped Reanna off at the airport and wouldn’t see her for a couple weeks. I’m also unemployed for those couple weeks, so I have a huge list of projects I am excited about getting done, in my trailer, around the yard, in the garden, etc. And I’m planning to sleep a lot, exercise a lot, cook a lot, and generally recuperate. It’s an inspiring vision. But when I got back to Joshua Tree, instead of brainstorming my vacation and getting to sleep early, I played an hour and a half of Candy Crush. The thing is, I’m not depressed any more and I have tons of stuff I want to do–that will be fun to do–but if I didn’t delete that game I would have frittered those precious two weeks away, having fun but isolated and having nothing to show for it. That’s not me. It had to go.