Amal Nahurriyeh

Happy Halloween from the Nahurriyehs.

(Alternative title: Marvin the Paranoid Android is Now My Spirit Animal.)

Most folks who know me on the internet know that I wrestle with depression. (I think wrestle is a better word for my experience of it than 'suffer'; I could go on about this, but I'll leave it for comments.) In particular, I'm dysthymic, which I often gloss as "I mean, you're depressed, but, like, it's not so bad, you could be more depressed." That is to say, dysthymia is depression where you can get out of bed in the morning, you just don't particularly see the point of it; where you aren't actually suicidal, you're just logically convinced the world would be a better place without you in it; where nobody knows you're depressed, because you do a reasonably good job of going about your regular activities, but you end each day in a little heap of not-caring anymore. It's not a particularly cheerful way to go on about your life, but it is a way. Dysthymia tends to manifest as a personality outlook more than anything else: that you just kind of are like this. Some people are cheerful. Some people are me.

Which is precisely why I love Marvin the Paranoid Android quite so much.

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Marvin is a regular character in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy, though, if I'm remembering right, he dies at the end of book four. (If that sentence doesn't make sense, just go with it.) He's appeared in each incarnation of the series, and was even voiced by Alan Rickman in the movie. Marvin is a prototype emotion android by the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation (they also make doors that are enthusiastic about opening for you, and elevators with a weak psychic field enabiling them to be on the floor you need before you realize you need it). However, his emotional range is remarkably stunted. He's depressed. He thinks the worst of everything. He trudges along, depressed, through his days.

Marvin's also smart. Very smart. He's thirty thousand times smarter than a human. He can think through anything, come up with whatever solution. Anything you ask him to do? It's beneath him. Tremendously, enormously beneath him. Martin is better than you. It's just a fact.

And this is what makes Marvin amazing. His depression isn't a hinderance. It's not a disability, a poison that ruins his days. His depression is his superpower. In the course of the first three books of the trilogy, Marvin manages to use his "hell of an outlook on life" (pace Zaphod) to do the following:

• Disable a police spaceship and the two police officers in the process of trying to kill the humanoid characters, by depressing it so much it committed suicide
• Convince a Frogstar Scout Robot Class D (which is basically a giant sentient tank) to shoot out the floor underneath it, thereby preventing it from going after Zaphod
• Defeat the entire Krikket robot brigade through making them sulk and do quadratic equations; also, incidentally, save Zaphod a bunch.

Marvin suffers no small number of abuses over the course of the first three books. (I'm sticking to those, since I haven't re-read the last two recently). He's left on Magrathea for five hundred billion years, and ends up parking cars at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. He crashes into the heart of a sun as part of a stunt for a rock concert. He is stuck in a swamp on Squamshelous Beta for millions of years with a poorly made false leg and only mattresses to talk to. (Oh, and the occasional bridge to cause to commit suicide.) Through all of these, he just keeps going. He doesn't get cheerful. He doesn't get saved. He never feels better.

He doesn't need to feel better. He's just what he is, absurdly pessimistic worldview and all. And being himself isn't a fault, or a problem. It's a gift, as fucked up as that is. His humanoids never would have gotten anywhere without him.

This all sounds terribly mopey. But on a day like today, when it's raining and dark out, when I've got a terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side in my eyesocket, when I'm sitting here staring at a piece of time-sensitive work that I really have to get done, and feeling incapable of doing it, I remember Marvin. And I think, maybe, I can get through it.