Birthday

I've been kind of torn on how to write about my birthday. I'd prefer to act like my life is great, but it really isn't. And I'm finally admitting to myself that I'm not improving with the anxiety and depression exactly as much as I'd been pretending that I was, even though I am learning healthier ways to think, as I've written about before.

So...mixed feelings. At the same time, birthday was great.

I was able to spend the day with Murray, and as my present he took me to a gun range where I got to shoot (well, with a gun that shoots a laser) in a simulator. My first shooting lesson was in the woods shooting at targets we'd brought, and as a second lesson this was pretty good. Apparently I'm a decent shot, too.

After that was delicious food, movies, and we may or may not have fallen asleep together on the futon in my parents' living room.

Dragon!

There was also pecan pie in place of cake, my family singing me happy birthday, and I got an awesome dragon wrapped around a sword from my parents. It's something to hang on the wall, though I haven't gotten around to putting it up. And although it didn't arrive in time for my birthday, Tall One ordered a Jayne's hat for me that I'm looking forward to wearing. I've been wanting one ever since I watched a particular episode in a certain TV show a few months back.

(If you don't know what a Jayne's hat is, watch Firefly.)

Then I finished up the day by staying up way too late with my Game of Thrones book that I can't believe I haven't read before now.

It's good that, even though I still don't know what to do about the anxiety/depression often, I can still have fun days.

On gun control

This is an issue I finally decided to address in this blog. I tried to once before, but deleted that post. What drove me to finally write and publish something on the topic is first a local shooting at Clackamas Mall on Tuesday, with two dead and the shooter suicided. And now today I've read about the shooting in a Connecticut school with too many children dead.

When this sort of thing happens people tend to start screaming about gun control, and about how we need such laws to prevent massacres and other tragedies from happening.

But let me ask you a question.

Do you really think that criminals, or those who are about to become criminals, won't find illegal ways to get guns? Do you really? If they followed the laws they wouldn't be criminals in the first place. And I guarantee that if guns were outlawed then there would be a black market for them, same as there is for illegal drugs.

The local shooting was bad enough, but my brain doesn't want to accept what I've read about the school shooting. I don't even know what to say, other than that these things need to not happen. But I don't think that banning guns is the solution. Unfortunately, I don't know what the solution actually is.