dianaschnuth

I am in a seriously funky depressed mood this evening. I have so many things I want to get done, but I can’t get motivated to make myself do them, which makes me more depressed and down on myself, and the cycle continues.

Then I think that writing about it on my blog will make the funk go away… but it doesn’t. It doesn’t work as the instant quick fix I sometimes think it should. This isn’t like IM or a phone call — there’s no instant connection with another human being, no actual real-time communication going on. Nothing to make me feel less blah.

I hate these moods. The objective, detached part of me looks from the outside in and says, “You know, Diana, if you’d just DO something, anything, you’d probably shake this thing. Just get the fuck over yourself and your weird depression and get on with it.” That makes the rest of me feel worse about my depression and my general sloth and sinks me deeper into it.

At least this doesn’t happen very much anymore. I seem to recall being like this frequently during middle school and high school, although I could be misremembering how depressed I really was. I know it felt pretty massive at the time.

Sometimes I think these off-the-cuff, unplanned and unscripted blog entries are what keeps my blog fresh and uniquely me. Then sometimes I think that my readership (and I’m averaging 40 hits a day, I think) really doesn’t give a rat’s ass about how depressed I am or how frumpy I feel or any other superficial crap. Where’s the pictures and the amusing anecdotes and the links to t-shirt surgeries and Totoro and weird Mormon crap and whatever else people Googled today?

I think I’m gonna go play some Civ III.

*contemplates deleting this entry*
*decides to keep it for posterity*

In recent memory, there has been no other book that has made me so pensive for an entire day after having read it. Almost melancholy, even. I was distracted all day at work, thinking about the ending and the relationships between characters and what was set up for Book 7.

If you haven’t finished reading HBP yet, and you intend to do so, you might want to hold off on reading this spoiler-laden post.
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I’m in one of those weird quiet moods. Kind of melancholy, I guess. Kind of lonely, maybe, and kind of bored. I can feel my face setting into a perpetual scowl for some reason. I feel like I’m missing something, or like I’ve thought of something I regret, though I can’t think of what it would be.

There’s no good reason for me to be all blah tonight. I have an appointment set up to meet with a certain gentleman about a potential extra-curricular design gig, so tally up one for the Go Me column. But I ate too much sugar today, and I’m sure it affected my blood sugar levels all day; I felt so tired, and still do. It’s messing with my energy level in a bad way.

If I could just make myself get UP and DO something, I know I’d feel better. Not reading a book, mind you—something like putting my clothes away, or maybe watering my poor thirsty houseplants, or going through a box of stored crap, or even just doing some jumping jacks or something. The trick is managing to get myself started.

I hate it when I get all like this. Meh.

I don’t remember what age I was when it occurred to me that some men like other men instead of liking women. I’m sure it must have been the movie Victor/Victoria that introduced me to the concept; it was (and is) a favorite of my Mom’s, and it was released in 1982. I don’t remember ever being creeped out by the idea, though, even when AIDS became widely known in the eighties, and everyone associated the condition with gay men.

I didn’t actually *know* an openly gay person until I was in high school. (At least, not that I was aware of.) Tim was a co-worker of my Mom’s, and I got to meet him and hang out with him quite a bit during high school. Tim was freaking cool: he had a few cats, he listened to Peter Gabriel and Ravi Shankar, he had an awesome huge five-foot-tall cactus that wore sunglasses and a hat, and I just remember him being generally fun to be around. Some of his friends called him “Timberly,” although I’m afraid that, for awhile, I knew him mainly as “my gay friend Tim.”
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I don’t fire up Instant Messenger very often. There’s some weird setting in Outlook Express that launches IM every now and then when I launch Outlook. Today, instead of closing it like I usually do, I opted to keep it on.

I’d almost forgotten I had IM running when I got a message from an old college friend. Well, not that old—I only graduated four years ago. (Has it been that long?) Anyway, we traded small talk: where are you working, how are you doing, et cetera. I messaged him an old picture of the two of us, and he was highly amused, though I wasn’t sure why.

One hour and a long, in-depth conversation later, I know why that picture was so amusing.

He doesn’t look like that anymore.

He looks like a she.

He—she—has a supportive boyfriend, has successfully transitioned into life as a woman (pretty much), and is much happier not living a lie.

Apparently, my friend ran into some major obstacles when he tried to “come out” in college: unsupportive friends and co-workers, and general rejection all around. (I was completely oblivious at the time.) S/he wasn’t sure how I’d react even now, five or six years later. It had been a while since we’d really talked, so s/he couldn’t have known my passion for tolerance and gay rights and my general political affiliations. Like I told him/her, “If guy-on-guy action is your thing, and you have the balls to admit it in a society that’s overall not too keen on it, then more power to you. That’s awesome.”

I’m so happy for her. Seeing her picture really drove it home for me. Finding yourself in such a big way… that’s just fucking awesome. I’m happier for her and her found-femininity and her boyfriend than I ever was for some of my hetero friends and their engagements and weddings.

I can’t get over it. It’s a giant mindfuck, but it’s so wonderful.