​October is without question my favorite month of the year (postseason baseball and the peak of election season and Central Park at its most beautiful in hues of red and orange? Where can I sign up?). However, despite the disregard with which my favorite poet famously spoke of it (“April is the cruelest month…”), April is in fact a close second for one reason only: the resumption of regular season baseball.
 
Some who look at my profile – political science academic, classic movie buff, walker of the fine line between cat person and cat lady, music junkie, and all-around proud intellectual nerd and politico – may find surprising my almost unmatched affection, nay, deep passion and conviction, for this sport on which I grew up and have continued to watch vociferously. It is true that it will never measure up to music in my book. Nothing can. There are never words so quickly loneliness-inducing as “I’m sitting in a railway station, got a ticket for my destination…” as wistful and dreamy as “The screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves…” as romantic as “These arms of mine,” as rage-inducing as “London Calling,” as quick to leap to my feet and dance (badly) as “Start me up.” And there is something about the opening guitar chord to “A Hard Day’s Night,” the opening harmonica chord of “Thunder Road,” and the opening drumbeat of “Graceland” that fills me with unmatched joy, knowing that even in a world seemingly intent on breaking my heart six ways to Sunday, at least for the next three or so minutes, all is right with the world.
 
But there is also a similar sound that is comforting in a way less accessible to those not as well-acquainted with the sport, and lost entirely by those watching baseball on muted televisions in bars. The sound to which I am referring is the meeting of the ball and the bat when you can hear just from the sound that it is a home run. Second only to my cats’ purring, I do believe it is my favorite sound in the world, and yet it is not easy to explain to those whose knowledge of baseball does not extend beyond discussions of steroid usage and the magical and romantic (though not in the traditional sense of the word) film Field of Dreams.
 
But you see, baseball is in my view (and I say this with the caveat that Cal Berkeley football (go bears) is the only other sport that I follow) the most magical and most romantic sport, for while we are unlikely to ourselves witness the return of Shoeless Joe Jackson, at the bottom of the ninth inning with runners in scoring position, virtually anything is possible. The right swing of the bat, the right sound echoing through the stadium as the bat meets the ball, and you’re looking at extra innings (and it’s still early April, so potentially coldly so). And that is just with regular season.
 
Postseason baseball is its own peculiar set of triumphs and trials, with some of the statistics with which we evaluate players (batting average, home runs, RBI’s, ERA’s, strikeouts, etc.) seemingly conditional upon playing in regular versus postseason, with some large treatment effects among the players. Some psych themselves out of the games. Bonds, for example, was a phenomenal players who was far more valuable during the regular season and seemingly choked postseason. Others look October in the face and say “bring it on.” Those are my favorites. Buster Posey’s grand slam in a 2012 playoff game against the Reds, and Madison Bumgarner’s flawless pitching against the Royals in 2014 will be forever burned into my brain. And yet even without a personal stake (to the extent that one is personally invested absent stocks or financial bets), I still find myself biting my nails when a friend posts a clip from a 1990s game involving the Chicago White Sox (a team for which I have rooted when dating a White Sox fan but am other otherwise unaffiliated). The White Sox were losing by a couple of runs going into the bottom of the ninth inning, but had loaded the bases. (Conversations as to the proper conditions under which to take out pitchers in such conditions can go on and on – for every story of a pitcher collecting himself and squeaking by with runners stranded, others can recall the first pitch by a new pitcher yielding an RBI or worse, though there appears to be consensus in St. Louis that Mike Matheny is too slow to change pitchers). Ventura, now the team’s manager, stepped to the plate. Even on this older footage, one can here the CRACK! of Ventura’s grand slam that won this game that had previously seemed a lost cause. How can one not be romantic about baseball?
 
It is not without at least some measure of reservation that I profess my profound love for baseball, not least of them being the notoriously conservative nature of the game, standing in stark contrast with my left-of-center preferences. Polls have shown a Democrat-Republican divide between football and baseball, with my political and sport preferences misaligned, and there are countless accounts of the baseball management funds contributed largely to the Republican Party (the Chicago Cubs are the leader in this regard). My home team of the San Francisco Giants has been fairly apolitical, and the New York Mets (I lived in New York City during graduate school) took a stand against gun violence in New York, though my current local team of the St. Louis Cardinals unfortunately allowed its mascot Fredbird to be photographed at a police rally while holding the sign “police lives matter” after the riots over the Ferguson shooting of Mike Brown and the acquittal of the (white) officer involved. I felt betrayed by this sport that has given so much joy, though also anxiety over the many years (I feel as though I’m writing about a relationship).
 
And yet for all my deep-rooted animosity toward the establishment for which the New York Yankees stand, sitting in the upper deck with a close friend at the new Yankee Stadium (where I committed to rooting for the Yankees only because they were playing the Bush-affiliated Texas Rangers) during a two-hour rain delay and watching the pinstriped footage of the greats, so many of whom had been on the Yankees, it was in fact quite difficult not to develop at least some measure of admiration for this team that had fostered such talents as Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, and Babe Ruth.
 
One of my favorite screenwriters is the oh-so-delightfully-cynical David Mamet, who in his film State and Main has a cheeky exchange between Alec Baldwin’s character and a child getting his autograph:
 
            Baldwin: Chuckie, what’s your favorite sport?
            Chuckie: (yelling) Baseball!
            Baldwin: Baseball… Well, that’s the national sport.
 
Silly and contrived though this exchange is, and intentionally so mind you, there is some truth to it. Baseball is distinctly an American pastime, and has historically been associated with patriotic wartime efforts such as the introduction of a women’s league while the able-bodied men were overseas fighting in World War II (see A League of Their Own if you haven’t yet). And it is dominated by another great love of mine, statistics, over which modelers and followers alike obsess in aspiration of better predicting in this moneyball game that in many ways is special because it is dominated by the intangible hope and spirit. Though of course, statistics are fun to mull over, e.g., pr(Cardinals win| playing Cubs), which is for reasons inexplicable to those out of the loop, different than the probability of success against a comparably ranked team. Statistics seem to defy games involving arch rivals. Bit if I left my heart in San Francisco, my heart likewise will forever remain with the San Francisco Giants (Gigantes!), win or lose, October season or not.
 
And so as a non-romantic in life, I find myself romantically drawn in to baseball every April to October (and my whiskey consumption increasing correspondingly). The season is young and full of possibilities, and I for one am eagerly awaiting what it will bring as these players – strangers in most ways but old friends in some strange sense – continue to “go the distance.”

​Auden’s “Funeral Blues” characterization of funeral perhaps most aptly describes the sense of loss that one feels upon the passing of a loved one: “He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.” While Auden shows us the devastation of funeral mourning, he does not there address the grappling with the permanence of that person’s passing, the transition to addressing the person forever in the past tense. That was something that hit home markedly at the memorial concert for a friend who tragically died in January at the young age of 30. We heard two hours of people delivering hauntingly beautiful performances of Amy’s music because she couldn’t. There was so much love, so much loss in that room, but so much finality about her never to return to the stage with that “extra dose of awesome,” guitar in hand and mic stand in front of her petite figure as she sang her songs of love and loss. Her music lives on now only through recordings and others’ renditions, which beautiful though they are, still echo her absence, her missingness. And none of us quite know how to grapple with accepting that loss. 

We all know the phrase. It isn't easy being green. Kermit was a wise frog. But maybe it's not so hard after all. Don't lose hope, Kermit (and other similarly-woed frogs of the world).

When we talk about the environment, we often create for ourselves a dichotomy between economics and environmental protection. And there is some merit in that. We impose oil taxes to increase the cleanliness (such as it is) and to incentivize reduced consumption. Green alternatives for products can be more expensive. Not everyone can afford a Prius as opposed to an older, less fuel-efficient model.

But there is also so much opportunity for job creation and innovation when we fully commit ourselves to environmental protection in ways that go beyond images of polar bears in melting ice or taking the bus instead of driving (if your city of residence has such infrastructure in place). And even as other nations have outpaced us on health care and education and certain technologies, Americans pride themselves on their innovation, tenacity, finding pathbreaking alternatives to the status quo.

There are few policies as ripe for innovation as environmental policy. From wind and solar technologies to finding new sources of alternative energy that we have not even yet considered, there are innumerable opportunities for those with scientific skills and craftsmanship to think outside the box, or better yet, beyond the box. Finding affordable ways to manufacture products sustainably provides other such opportunities to bring new ideas and visions to the table, some of which may well fail, but some of which may allow us some meaningful breakthroughs so that we can collectively work to leave the planet better than how we found it (or at least not considerably worse).

There inevitably are costs of compliance with environmental regulations, and some small businesses may feel the pinch. But if possible, it would behoove us all, especially amid the policy rhetoric of the coming months of the presidential election to set aside the false dichotomy of economic security versus environmental protection. Without a planet with breathable air and drinkable water, the economic impacts may begin to pale in comparison. With economic investment in hiring smart people to develop ways to limit our environmental impact, we can have both. The ball is in our court.

At first, it was nothing. Then something. Then everything. Drifting to sleep in fear I might wake up.
 
There is a special kind of sadness in being reminded that we don’t know the last time that we’ll see people, their smiles, hear their voices, the assumption that “see you later” isn’t merely illusory. I was reminded of that in early January of this year as I scanned my email while at an academic conference and learned of the unexpected passing of a friend with whom I had been making plans to get together only three weeks earlier. I had told her that I was struggling to get out of bed, how much energy everything took for the simple acts of bathing and dressing. She wrote back, “I am in such a strong and bright place so maybe I can be some light for you,” and reminded me of how strong I had seemed to her when I claimed that I had been “faking it” through the days. Perhaps we both were.
 
There is perhaps a greater sadness in coming to consciousness in a hospital afterwards, a hot pink wristband identifying one’s inability to leave of one’s own accord because a bottle of bills coupled with a bottle of wine and some whiskey failed to garner the intended effect, when realizing that they’re still sticking around despite their best efforts. I learned that four days after I learned of my friend’s passing, my vision blurred and my thoughts foggy, my body now adorned in oversized scrubs into which I had been changed without permission. That this was not my first such attempt exponentiated that sadness. Sadness squared.
 
I am far from the first to write on the challenges posed by the personal experience of depression and the broader ramifications of its pervasiveness, coupled with persistent stigma and inadequate treatments available. (The worst among us have been deemed “treatment-resistant,” a label that even a doctorate degree cannot help one weasel, or intellectualize, out of). Carrie Fisher, whose writing and perseverance I have long admired, has written extensively on the subject both through the lenses of fiction (Postcards from the Edge) and autobiography (Wishful Drinking) as well as advocacy work on the challenges posed by addiction and bipolar disorder (“If my life wasn’t funny, it would just be true, and that is unacceptable”). Robert Sapolsky delivered an excellent lecture in 2009 on the biochemistry, as well as the psychological experience of depression, characterizing it as “basically the worst disease you can get,” and a medical disease akin to a diagnosis of diabetes. And The End of the Tour (2015) provided a film adaptation of Lipsky’s chronicle of the Infinite Jest book tour of David Foster Wallace, who took his own life in 2008 after a long battle with depression. Wallace’s characterization of suicidality has long haunted me, the notion that while a woman’s fear of jumping from a burning building may not dissipate but may nevertheless pale in comparison to the alternative of enduring the flames that await her otherwise.
 
And that is just it. Oblivion is rarely the goal in taking pills with bourbon, with standing on the ledge of a bridge and finally letting go, with summoning courage before the arrival of a train at full speed. Indeed, even in my darkest moments I have maintained my adherence to Woody Allen’s amusing quote, “I’m not afraid of dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Rather, the goal is putting an end to pain when the world is breaking your heart twelve ways to Sunday, when everything hurts and each movement elicits the feeling of having been saddled with lead weights, when like in Sartre’s No Exit, you’re trapped, paralyzed by a nightmare that occurs only during waking hours. And unless there is a marked change in the propensity for this disease to be stigmatized, the silence only perpetuates one’s feeling of isolation and cognitive distortions.
 
Academia is hardly the only professional field that dramatically exacerbates this disorder – indeed, recent accounts have chronicled medical doctors’ struggles with depression and suicide – though to be sure the field glamorizes all-nighters writing, putting work before spousal or health considerations or other support systems, being scholars before being humans. Burnout is not so much a need for help as it is evidence of hard work, glorified in the way that athletes sometimes boast of their bruises. Moreover, those with whom we work are scholars with whom we will continue to interact for the duration of our careers, encouraging further reticence with respect to these struggles, a self-imposed loneliness that can in some cases be fatal. There are few things more devastating than building a life around a commitment to scholarship and finding that the organ around which we have built our careers and sense of selves is the same one that is failing us. What is left of us? We are trained to muscle our way through problems, intellectualize situations, and dust ourselves off because we must. Letting feelings wash over one is a vulnerability to which many prefer not to subject themselves. And when all faith and identity are concentrated in a single dimension of one’s life, it is not hard to conceive of the ease with which one can fall down the rabbit hole of major depression with only a relatively minor professional setback.
 
Such pervasiveness of depression and anxiety among academics and other high-powered professionals was perhaps no more apparent to me than in a depression group in Manhattan, with almost every member, regardless of the level of functioning, having at least one degree from an Ivy League institution, and almost all with advanced degrees from prestigious national universities. The toll that such a set of incentives can take on a perfectionistic and high-achieving individual, particularly one predisposed to depression as I am, can be massive, rendering death a consummation devoutly to be wished, each new day a series of hours to endure before bedtime and the respite of sleep or the horror of insomnia, depending on the particular constellation of one’s symptoms. In a population of individuals rarely prone to voluntarily admit what they may view as defeating or in need of assistance that could yield a professional setback, there is reason to suspect that even the high rates of depression self-reported involve some underreporting.
 
Indeed, the depression screening that my primary care doctor gives me at each of our visits comes with the explicit questions that it asks me to report (e.g., loss of interest, insomnia, thoughts of self-harm), as well as the questions that I ask myself as to how much help I am willing to accept given my responses, the answer of which invariably impacts the results that I provide him. And while by all accounts both have biological components, there is no question that I find it easier to blame fatigue or absence from work on my thyroid than on my depression or trauma from sexual assaults. Even with a growing number of people calling upon us to destigmatize mental illness, many of us remain closeted, confiding in precious few if any colleagues about our struggles within this realm, leaving us with few if any to whom to turn when the call comes in with the destabilizing news of a death. The ripple effects of suicide, often characterized as suicide contagion, are quite real, and to which I admittedly was a near contributor. Insulation against such actions is difficult when we feel compelled to use stoicism as concealer for feelings and cover-up to conceal our scars.
 
At stake in the primary elections and even more so in the general election this November is the fate of health care in this nation. Marked income losses from depression and medical leaves have been documented, alongside accounts that access to mental health care lags behind other health services in both availability and funding, even as rates of depression and other mental illnesses continue to be high across demographic groups. Indeed, even with the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of mental health services, the number of psychiatrists accepting insurance as in-network providers continue to be low relative to other physicians, thus reducing access to needed services for populations that may have insurance but nevertheless be unable to afford to utilize it, a problem faced by millions of Americans. Amid the ordinary stressors of work and family, coupled with the ineligibility for government programs and the inability to afford self-pay services or large copayments, working class Americans can easily find themselves in vicious cycles of living in conditions ripe for depression and anxiety triggers but without the means to treat them. We have seen this discussion in the context of the ever-present Medicaid gap, and must promote greater discussion in the context of mental health care. Ensuring the election of a president willing to confront and fund these issues – and not merely within the context of gun violence, a frequent parallel that does disservice to the treatment of a patient population that is largely non-violent (at least toward others) – will be imperative.
 
When sadness turns to sadness squared (or sadness to the n power), it is all too easy to lose the perspective adequate to maintain the will, let alone interest, to persevere. It is at that point that we most need permission and resources to draw on a support system to yank us from that state and remind us that tomorrow needn’t be as bad as today but that we need to stick around in order to find out, to not simply want us to live but to want to live and to understand the difference.