{"id":12,"date":"2009-01-21T11:50:01","date_gmt":"2009-01-21T15:50:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/directionhome\/?p=12"},"modified":"2009-01-21T11:55:02","modified_gmt":"2009-01-21T15:55:02","slug":"crises-without-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/directionhome\/2009\/01\/21\/crises-without-end\/","title":{"rendered":"Crises without End"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m in trouble. Not again. Still. What changes is the amplitude. It is modulated. Only a few percent.<strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/2007\/12\/01\/lighting-the-grays\/\" target=\"_blank\">I\u2019ve never known when it wasn\u2019t this way.<\/a><\/strong><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/2007\/12\/01\/lighting-the-grays\/\" target=\"_blank\"> The AIDS pandemic,  doesn&#8217;t have to be this way.<\/a> I don&#8217;t know about my crises. Fifty years and a dozen &#8216;mental health professionals&#8217; have been to no avail.<\/p>\n<p>I am not one of The Organized.<\/p>\n<p>I missed an appointment with Lauren. She had offered me a Home Start planner book. I appreciate the thought, but I&#8217;ve been that route. During one of my many &#8217;bouts of unemployment, I decided I needed a planner book. $50. Way too much for an unemployed guy. Then too none of the layouts seemed right.  I went to Bob Slate&#8217;s, Harvard Square&#8217;s premier stationary store. For $17 I made the most beautiful planner book in the history of planner books. It had just the things in it that I needed. It was great &#8211; my creation. It helped me do stuff.  It made me a better person without even being reincarnated. I liked it. I felt it was my friend.<\/p>\n<p>As time went on I found that I hadn&#8217;t quite got it right. Was I wrong initially or had my needs changed? I don&#8217;t know. It became an obsession &#8211; finding the design that would achieve my real goal &#8212; programming myself to perfection. It became a burden &#8211; an albatross of my own making. It became my enemy. Finally, I rose up. I revolted against my own creation &#8211; an extension of myself. I haven&#8217;t used it since.<\/p>\n<p>I am not one of The Organized. I misplace things. I lose things. I forget things. It has gotten worse over the years. In the last 6 years,  I was in &#8216;private&#8217;<sup>1<\/sup> housing.\u00a0 It got a lot worse. <a href=\"http:\/\/theguywhomakeswindows.wordpress.com\/2007\/04\/30\/storage\/\" target=\"_blank\">My roomate made no attempt to make room for me to put my stuff.<\/a> Instead he blamed me for being disorganized.  Even The Organized  would have had a hard time using only the interior of the rooms.  But then The Organized don&#8217;t admit to mistakes. They lie. And my roomate was not one of The Organized. He just lied.<\/p>\n<p>I think homelessness has made it worse. Carrying all your worldly possessions on your back means constant packing and unpacking.  It&#8217;s easy to loose things. But I&#8217;m too disorganized to be sure. The Organized were unable to tell me how to connect with Lauren over the holidays. It took me four tries. Wait &#8217;till the New Year. The Organized equivocate.<\/p>\n<p><sup>1<\/sup>I don&#8217;t have time now to give the Lockean justification of private property, as portrayed to tens of thousands of Harvard students by <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Michael_Sandel\">Professor Micheal<\/a>, the thorough trouncing it deserves. I&#8217;m in crisis, still.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m in trouble. Not again. Still. What changes is the amplitude. It is modulated. Only a few percent. I\u2019ve never known when it wasn\u2019t this way. The AIDS pandemic, doesn&#8217;t have to be this way. I don&#8217;t know about my crises. Fifty years and a dozen &#8216;mental health professionals&#8217; have been to no avail. I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":168,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/directionhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/directionhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/directionhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/directionhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/168"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/directionhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/directionhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/directionhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/directionhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/directionhome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}