{"id":14739,"date":"2013-11-11T12:27:30","date_gmt":"2013-11-11T20:27:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2013\/11\/11\/14739.html"},"modified":"2013-11-11T12:27:30","modified_gmt":"2013-11-11T20:27:30","slug":"cheerier-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2013\/11\/11\/cheerier-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Mood swingy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

(For anyone missing the context: Today is the 33rd anniversary of my mother<\/a>'s death, and it would've been my father<\/a>'s 74th birthday. I miss them both.)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>” came on, and I thought, Oh, good, this one's kind of high-energy, it'll get my spirits up<\/i>, but I had forgotten that the whole point of the song is that the world is going to hell.<\/p>\n

So by about halfway there, I was on the verge of turning around and going home and spending the evening moping around by myself.<\/p>\n

But then “Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella<\/a>” came on, and “Love Grows One by One<\/a>,” and things seemed a little brighter.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> story (“Cinderella and the Three Bears”), and then I sang along with “Fiddler's Hymn<\/a>” (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<\/a>”). 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.<\/p>\n

Anyway, at least for a while, I was in a much better mood than I've been lately.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(For anyone missing the context: Today is the 33rd anniversary of my mother’s death, and it would’ve been my father’s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,29,7,118,106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-death","category-life-updates","category-music","category-parents-children","category-sleep"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14739\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}