Wednesday's Child is Full of Woe...
I was therefore not even remotely surprised to learn that I was born on a Wednesday. It's good to finally have an explanation of all this woe. And of course, it's all my own fault...I was due on Monday, which would have made me Fair of Face, but I wasn't quite finished dressing...you wouldn't believe how hard it is to get a proper crease and a good manicure in utero. On the other hand, that Monday was Christmas, and I'm not sure a fair face would be adequate recompense for having to share my birthday with Jesus Christ, rather than with Marlene Dietrich. I mean, sure, the former redeemed humanity and saved us all from sin and godlessness (or so They claim), but I'm more impressed by the latter's abilities to wear a twelve-foot-long white chinchilla coat in a hot spotlight and sing badly before a stadium full of screaming fags who paid top dollar to be there.So anyway, back to the bitching about my woe (you didn't honestly think I would start a blog with that title and not launch immediately into a lurid bitchfest, did you?)
I realized a few days ago that this bleak, mopey, verge-of-tears, I-hate-everybody feeling I have been laboring with this month is just my cyclical Depression stopping in for its biannual visit. I usually sink into a depressed state every six months, generally falling in the August/September and February/March ranges. Bipolar disorder and other various forms of depression run rampant in my family tree, hand-in-hand with a predilection for substance abuse, weak teeth, teenage acne, degenerative myopia, and considerably more intelligence than attention-span. It made my occasional depression easier to get through, though, when I realized that it was a condition, a physical problem rather than a circumstantial problem. It's like catching a cold instead of being hung over...not my fault, nor other people's faults, just nothing I can do about it but ride it out...until someday down the line when it gets so bad that I have to be medicated. From what I understand, this sort of inherited depression is very like inherited myopia...it gets worse as you get older.
The thing is, though, that even while I understand that my feeling low is just a chemical imbalance, it doesn't stop me from cracking under the pressure of everyday misfortunes. I feel that every thing that happens to me this month is another evidence that God doesn't like me, that I must have been a real asshole in a previous life, and/or that some supernatural agency (be it Fate, Fortune, or Miss Cleo) is out to get me...I'm not paranoid, it's just that they're following me...
Take Monday for example. It was spectacularly bad!
The weekend had been tiring, but fun: on Saturday I cleaned almost the whole house in one morning (exhausting, but satisfying) then traipsed off the the City to get together with some friends and officiate at Drag Bingo (someone else was supposed to call the numbers, but that someone pooped out, so I got to live the undreamed-of dream, calling Bingo in drag), then got back out of drag with the same friends and went out for midnight breakfast at Baghdad Cafe; Sunday I had to get up early and help Grandmother pack, then went out to (morning) breakfast with her, her nephew Lee (whose visit occasioned Saturday's housecleaning), and my uncle, before Lee and Grandmother took off for a visit to GM's old hometown, Visalia CA...then spent the afternoon scouring a few flea markets and second-hand stores (without finding anything worth buying), and the rest of the evening loafing around the (empty and eerily silent) house, playing video games and watching television.
But come Monday...I should have known when I woke up with my shoulders painfully hunched and my back curved unnaturally, with all of my muscles clenched and sore, that it was going to be a bad day...here's a rule of thumb for the future: if you have to do relaxation exercises and electric massage before you can even get out of bed, you may want to just stay there. So anyway, when I did manage to get myself unraveled, showered, and breakfasted, I got to the office and found that the parking spaces were full...so I had to park way the hell over on the other side of the District Office, which is a good fifteen-minute walk away. A pleasant walk, but I had to go right into the sun, and I didn't have either a hat or my sunglasses, so I got to the office with a lovely headache and a squint.
When I arrived back at the office, I was just in time to see the Boss Lady go into a meltdown. Certain dramas are going down here in the world of my office, and she is getting all emotional over them...she broke down in tears on four separate occasions during the day, notably when she took me to task for publishing a meeting agenda containing a certain item that she'd told me to delete; she went on to accuse me of passive-aggresively sabotaging her work and making her feel unsupported and unloved. I took that with a certain equanimity, even though I felt it was unfair, because I know from long experience that rational argumentation and over-emotional crying people do not mix.
Later on in the day, when I was enjoying a quiet moment at my lunch hour and typing away about my thoughts on book-to-film conversions (in relation to The Queen of the Damned) and expressing my extreme loves for the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers and Mary Renault, I accidentally hit the menu key and the letter B, instead of [SHIFT]-B (damned fingernails), and lost all of my quite voluminous and interesting writings as the browser reverted to the previous page and discarded all unsaved information. It made me so angry my stomach hurt. And I didn't have time to retype the bare skeleton of information, much less look up all my links again. So I just sat there, screaming on the inside, for about ten minutes before I managed to get up and go do something else.
Finally, at the end of the day, I went hiking back to my car, and discovered on arrival that my passenger-side window was gone...actually, it was all there, but half of it was lying on the sidewalk and half was scattered across the seat. Some idiot asshole moron of a thief had come along, saw my $17 portable CD player lying on the seat, and so broke the window out to take it. Fortunately for me, though much to my irritation, the thief did not linger to make a proper haul, but instead left some jewelry in the glove compartment, my checkbook and credit card in the saddlebag, my camera and birding glasses behind the seat, and an expensive overcoat in the back. It's vexing to be robbed, but even more vexing to be violated by someone of such crashing, monumental stupidity. I mean, anyone of the meanest intelligence would have seen that the CD player was manufactured by Tozai, and had less market value than my hubcaps, which would have been much easier to obtain.
Well, it was hugely inconvenient, and cost me $122.65 and two hours out of my work-day to get it fixed. Plus one of my favorite Ella Fitzgerald CDs was in the player, so I'll have to replace that as well...not to mention getting a new portable CD player for the car (the moron didn't even try to take the tape-deck adapter or the DC-adapter lighter-plug, for which I also paid more than I did for the stupid CD player). But it could have been worse, I keep telling myself...but it couldn't have come at a worse time, when I just didn't have the emotional strength to deal with it. I spent most of yesterday trying not to cry over every little thing, which ended up giving me a sinus headache.
Well, now that's all taken care of, I have the rest of the week to get through. And hopefully the Depression will be over soon. Charting the progress of general bitchiness and cynicism in my blogs here and at the Galaxy Girls Site, I can see that the depression got started in late January, so it shouldn't take more than a week or so to run its course. And I can get back to being a cheerful, happy type of person that I like being, the creature of sweetness and light and optimism that I admire so.
In the meantime, at least I can soothe the savage breast with my vast collection of gorgeous-man photographs: