Los Angeles

I visited LA for two days in August to visit my sister and a friend from my year in Italy.

I did not take one photo. I can report the air was better in LA than it was in Seattle. My sister and I ate really good Peruvian food.  I went on an 8 mile urban hike as I walked from my sister's neighborhood to my friend's. I listened to the Wilderness podcast. Great fun.

Bellingham

I went to Bellingham for a couple of days last month with mom friends. Our kids have never hung out and are completely different so we have to hang out on our own. We've started a monthly get together so we can have parent friends during middle school. We are all isolated for our own reasons, and we have fun together.

Bellingham is really beautiful. We walked along a lovely downtown board walk and had lunch at a brewery I've been to many times but can't remember the name.. I am such a good travel writer.  Other than that, we just hung around and went from restaurant to bar to theater to walking trails. Lots of fun.

Lost Connections

My brother recommended this book to me. It was recommended to him by some intrusive software that had figured out he was going through a hard time.  The book is about the recent history of depression and anxiety and the current theories about their treatment.

The writer is someone who had suffered from depression since adolescence. He is from Britain but they have many of the same problems we do and they treat depression in the same way: they medicate it without asking any other questions about the person's life.

The author documents lots of really good reasons an average person in the US or Europe would be depressed or anxious ( they are treated as the same thing in the book -- their treatments by the medical community are the same):  lack of community and social and family ties, lack of autonomy from monotonous low paid and/or high stress work, empty values such as materialism that simply lead to emptiness.

I remember years ago when a friend called me to say she was considering taking medication for depression. I said, of course you are depressed. We live in a culture that hates women.  Who is happy here? Only people swimming upstream and that is exhausting.

In the years since I had to learn this lesson for myself.. so much easier said that done. To be content in our culture is an act of defiance against the rules of the society and the force and influence of our human condition. I've had to redefine the rules by which I live to avoid the fate of so many. It is a lot of swimming upstream but it's very worth it. Plus, as the author points out, the medication doesn't work for long.

Good book.