Feeling quite dark and depressed right now.
As usual, there is no particular cause except maybe bad sleep. Right now, I feel hopeless and miserable. Nothing seems worth doing and I am just going through the motions right now. I hate everyone and everything.
I’m in a lot of pain.
Luckily, I know for a fact that this will change. That this is temporary, and that once I have been awake for a while, all this darkness and pain will evaporate and I will feel a lot better than I do right now.
Like I said, I know this to be true.
But I don’t feel like it’s true.
That’s because one of the hardest things for human beings to imagine is being in an emotional state other than the one they are in right now.
Every mood feels like it will last forever. We’re largely not conscious of this effect, and if someone asked us if we thought we would feel different later, we would probably grudgingly admit that yeah, probably. we would.
But we wouldn’t really mean it because it wouldn’t feel true. Imagining ourselves in another mood is so hard that it can be downright painful.
Why is this? I am not sure. Perhaps there is only room for one mood in our minds. So when we try to imagine another, we get an error.
If so, it would be that way in order to maintain emotional continuity and stability. If we could truly and fully imagine being in another mood, we would shift to that mood, and if shifting mood was that easy our moods would shift wildly all the time and we would be incapable of anything like rational or even coherent thought.
So we’re all like dogs who whine when their master leaves because as far as they know, you will be gone forever.
In most people’s lives, this is no big deal. They are mentally healthy and so even very bad moods are relatively short lived and unlikely to drive them to do anything dire.
In fact, the fact that they can’t imagine being in any other mood might be a factor in their being mentally healthy because it means they stay with an emotion until they are one hundred percent done processing it instead of hitting that emotional override switch and leaving most of the emotion lingering around unprocessed indefinitely.
I mean, that’s what I do, and trust me, it’s not good.
As a result, it’s taken me a long time to develop the ability to believe that this too shall pass. And like I indicated above, I don’t really feel it or believe it.
I just know it, in a cold detached kind of way. And that’s just barely enough to keep me from drawing conclusions about my life from my poor mental state, thereby hopping onto that downward spiral of depression that, if unchecked, could lead to dire acts.
It gives me enough emotional breathing room to be able to more or less ignore a bad mood until it goes away.
And it always does.
And it always will.
And when it does, I will still be here, making it through the day.
And that, my friends, is victory.
More after the break.
Tiny Little Peeves
Some people have big major life-altering pet peeves.
I am not one of those people.
Instead I have dozens, if not hundreds of tiny peeves that only I understand or would even think of in the first place.
Like my beef[1] with Subway. Don’t get me wrong : I love eating there. It’s one of my favorite fast food places. I’ve loved it since I was at UPEI[2] and there was one that was the closest place to eat to the campus.
My beef is with their slogan : Eat Fresh.
YOU CANNOT VERB AN ADJECTIVE, SUBWAY.
That’s just plain not the way words work.
You can eat freshLY or freshER or fresh THINGs, but you cannot eat fresh.
This bugs me every time I go there. I keep praying that they will get a new slogan. One that doesn’t crash the English language.
Another one : I hate it when the author’s name takes up 7/8 of the cover page of a book.
Not only does that make it hard to find the specific book you are looking for, it heavily implies that as far as publishers are concerned, it’s the name that sells the book and the actual specifics of the content are irrelevant.
And while that might be true in the brutal world of marketing, as a writer myself I would hate to think someone bought my book just because I wrote it.
I want them to love the book, not me. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I crave glory and adulation as much as any other person. I have a latent huge ego that I am really hoping I can justify one day.
But if I had to choose, I would rather people love the book more than they love me. The book is my baby. I’m proud of it. I want it to do well.
And the book is the best representation of who I am as a person. It’s a much better indicator than, say, some stupid thing I said in an interview that one time.
Finally, and admittedly this one is rather big : I hate that journalism has become so debased and craven that the mainstream media now treats entertainment news as though it is real news.
The real news is actually relevant to the audience’s lives. It’s serious stuff, and should be treated that way.
Entertainment news is merelya euphemism for celebrity gossip, and unless Geroge Clooney is running for public office, his love life is definitely not news.
“Oh, but it’s what people want to hear about!” whines the mainstream media.
Well call me old-fashioned, but I think the news should tell people what they need to know, not what they want to know.
You wouldn’t want to go to a doctor who treats every disease by writing a prescription for heavy painkillers, and justifies it by saying “But it’s what the people want!”.
Take some fucking responsibility, Doctor Feelgood.
I could go on. Like I said, I have dozens of these.
But that’s enough for tonight.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.
.