Blog Envy

I tried several times yesterday to get somewhere on the Internet, anywhere, but kept coming up blank. It must have been stuck. I mean, I even tried running spybot, ad aware, and a couple other virus scanners on the computer, tried disk cleanup and defrag, and still couldn't get anywhere, even after re-booting a couple of times. I talked to Eric and Susan yesterday, and they had trouble as well, so I'm hoping it wasn't just inept me.

Yesterday, I had to go in for jury duty, got put into the replacement pool, and didn't get selected, so I went home, tried to nap, and ended up working all three crossword puzzles in the paper, and starting a pulp fiction kind of mystery book by Gary Krist called Bad Chemistry. I guess I just needed a little mental exercise and then relaxation. I read crap books for utter enjoyment, one of my few guilty pleasures (not that I have many besides listening to and owning records by The Bee Gees and eating ice cream from the container), since I always think I should be setting my literary goals at a much loftier level, but have yet to make it through the first page of Cervantes' Don Quixote without falling asleep, and have never made it past the first paragraph of War and Peace.

I read about three or four blogs on a regular basis, and am frequently confronted with an inane and pointless irritation - finding myself jealous of other writers. I'm either jealous that they can write so well, or I'm jealous that they have all kinds of cool experiences. I'm mean, it's truly pathetic to be jealous of another person's life, isn't it? Yet there it is. I'm not hip, urbane, living in a foreign country, working at a fantastic job, being madly courted by a suave, debonair chevalier, or having erotic poetry written for me. I'm starting to think that I need to get myself back into psycho-therapy to find out why I'm so dissatisfied with my life. Seriously, I'm relatively young and healthy, I have two beautiful children at home and two grown ones out on their own, so genetically, I'm successful, I have a decent job, a roof over my head, plenty to eat, clothes on my back, and several very close friends. So why am I feeling so empty? I'm having a sneaking feeling that another episode of depression is creeping up on me, and I'd like to be able to head it off at the pass.

It's been several months since I've been seriously depressed, and I usually get over it pretty quickly. I do one of four things, cry, eat, drink, or have sex, and that usually works to get me over a blue funk. But then sometimes I get a spell that's worse than normal, and it lingers for days, sometimes weeks. I haven't had one of those in several years, but I can normally feel them coming on, now that I know what they are. It just feels like I'm spinning my wheels sometimes, is all, I guess, and I don't know how to get out of the hamster habitat. I know these fits are probably fostered by outside situations rather than by a true bipolar disorder, but they sure make me feel manic-depressive. The impetus today was probably the discussion which would have become heated if given enough time (thankfully, arriving at work curtailed it) in which Logan and I had major disagreements over whether or not to buy the new house, buying a new car, and generally our relationship with each other.

I'd write more, but I feel like I might cry, it's so frustrating. Besides, I've only got 15 minutes left in which to grab some lunch, drink some water, and go walk. That, or read more of the trashy thriller....