Mood swingy
(For anyone missing the context: Today is the 33rd anniversary of my mother's death, and it would've been my father's 74th birthday. I miss them both.)
I wrote most of this entry on Saturday night, under the title “Cheerier.” Then I was going to post it on Sunday morning, but various things intervened, and by the time I got to it, I was no longer feeling cheerier, so it seemed weird to post it. So now I'm posting it with some addenda.
On my way to a birthday party on Saturday night, I was in a pretty bad mood. I tried calling someone, but my phone wouldn't complete the call. So I tried listening to music, but it turns out that an awful lot of my music is on the melancholy side. Normally I like that sort of thing, but it wasn't helping, so I was skipping through songs trying to find something to lift my mood. I did find a few, and that helped a little. But then Judy Small's “The Revolution's Here” came on, and I thought, Oh, good, this one's kind of high-energy, it'll get my spirits up, but I had forgotten that the whole point of the song is that the world is going to hell.
So by about halfway there, I was on the verge of turning around and going home and spending the evening moping around by myself.
But then “Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella” came on, and “Love Grows One by One,” and things seemed a little brighter.
So I continued on to the party, where it took me a while to get into a communicative mode, but I ended up having a good time. Convivial company, good food, interesting and entertaining conversation, and several chances to say funny stuff and get people to laugh, which always makes me feel a little more comfortable.
I drove home much happier than I'd been earlier. And iTunes obliged by finding me stuff that would've been very helpful with the mood earlier, notably a Maynard Moose story (“Cinderella and the Three Bears”), and then I sang along with “Fiddler's Hymn” (link is to a recording by a different group, but it's fairly similar to Cross Country's lovely original version), and then another Maynard Moose story (“Pegamoose and the Gorgonzola”). And really what all this suggests to me is that I ought to create a cheering-up playlist and listen to that when I need it, rather than just haphazard random picks from my music collection.
Anyway, at least for a while, I was in a much better mood than I've been lately.
So that was Saturday night. But Sunday morning, by the time I was ready to post this, my cheeriness was having a hard time surviving when faced with trying to get FrameScript to convert many many old FrameMaker files to formats I could read, on a ten-year-old PowerBook G4 that's the only computer I have left that can run FrameMaker. So I spent most of Sunday banging my head against half a dozen computer problems (including my Internet connection coming and going intermittently). A lot of frustration and annoyance (including spending a long time in the garage trying to find a particular old software box), punctuated with occasional cheerfulness and moments of satisfaction.
So by Sunday night, I was pretty wrung out. But then I did some writing (reviving an old novel idea, which I'd written 6000 words on and then abandoned, which was part of the reason I was doing all that FrameMaker conversion), and then I got eight and a half hours of sleep (for the second time in three nights), and today so far I seem to be doing reasonably well. Unless I stop to think about stuff like Typhoon Haiyan, I mean. Or about soldiers dying in wars.
So anyway, I've retitled this entry to be more about mood swings and less about the arc of my mood bending toward cheeriness, and now I'm posting it. And after I post it, I'd better go do some work.
